Speaking from a lifetime of experience, and drawing upon their
own rich heritage as black Americans, Howard and Wanda Jones in this book
have set forth with candor, wisdom, and sympathy the problems besetting the
black community. Unlike so many commentators, they are not content to examine
the symptoms but they analyze in depth the root causes of those problems.
Their analysis is hard-hitting, perceptive  and at times controversial.
Nevertheless, by highlighting the crucial importance of the family and
pinpointing the pressures which have torn apart so many black families today,
the Joneses convincingly demonstrate why there can be no lasting solution
to the social and moral crises of our time apart from the renewal of the
family unit.

They correctly note, however, that there can be no
effective renewal of the family apart from spiritual renewal, and the principles
God has given us in His Word. Through a careful study of the biblical principles
for family living, they point the way to the solution. Although written mainly
for the black community, this book sets forth in a practical and clear way
the spiritual foundations which should undergird every family.

For many years, it has been my privilege to have Howard
Jones as a member of my Team, and I have always had the

Page 6

deepest respect and admiration for his ministry and his family.
I am delighted he and his wife, Wanda, have written such a timely and practical
book. This could well become one of the most significant books of the decade
 not just for blacks, but for all Americans regardless of ethnic
background. It deserves the widest possible circulation.

The American family is struggling to keep its head above water
in an era of unprecedented stress. For every two couples getting married
today there is also one divorce. And 50 percent of American children today
will live at least part of their growing-up years in a single-parent household.
As more and more mothers enter the work force, there is a growing percentage
of children who spend a major portion of each week in day-care facilities
or as latch-key children. Alcoholics and drug addicts are packing out treatment
centers as people struggle to keep from passing the sins of one generation
on to the next.

Nowhere have these problems so devastated the family
as in the black community, particularly in the inner city. What concerns
us is the slow, yet persistent deterioration of African-American culture
and the loss of the high moral and spiritual values that have seen blacks
through the dark days of slavery, repression, and racism. The foundation
that held the black community together during its bleakest hours was the
family, rooted more often than not in a deep family faith, hand in hand with
the black church.

Today that foundation is disintegrating from within
and without. Even as we have gained (and lost) civil rights, even as more
black Americans are achieving the American dream, even as black athletes
and music stars rise, we are

Page 8

losing great numbers of our children to poverty, drugs, and
hopelessness. We are losing our black men to unemployment, underemployment,
drug use and drug dealing, alcoholism, AIDS, violence, homicide, and prison.
We are losing our black women to teenage pregnancy, as they drop out of school
and begin an endless cycle of welfare or try to live on pauper's wages. We
are losing the influence and strength of the black church which once helped
bind us together.

As individuals, families, and churches in the black
community, we need to return to our spiritual roots. We need to make family
a priority. We need to lift up the role models of solid black families who
have become the role models for the new generation. We must give back to
our children and communities what we have been given. We must have
hope.

The church of Jesus Christ and the people of Jesus
Christ have the answer for the crisis in the black family. But we have been
slow to do our job. Historically, the black church has been a place of refuge,
a place where our people could go and have their fears relieved and their
pain comforted. But the black church must also become a place of development
 a place where we not only find strength in the foundation of our faith,
Jesus Christ, but a place where we can learn to make our way as whole, nurturing
families.

In this book we focus on our heritage of strong, black
families before grappling with the crisis which is threatening their very
existence. We explore what is happening to our black men, and challenge men
to fulfill the role only they can fill as husbands and fathers. We examine
the foundations for once again building strong black families, and from there
consider the roles of husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, the importance
of spiritual and moral values, discipline and guidance of children, the role
of the black church, and what we blacks must do to take control of our own
destiny.

Page 9

Central to this book is our relationship with Jesus
Christ. Without His help and direction and obedience to the Word of God no
family is complete. He is the building block on which all other issues rest.
He offers hope for all families who are suffering.

We wish to give a special word of appreciation to our friends at
Victor Books who encouraged us to get started on this book  Mark Sweeney,
vice president; Carole Sanderson Streeter; and Mavis Sanders.

We sincerely thank David and Neta Jackson, who faithfully
worked with us during the long months of research and writing; and special
thanks also to Billy Graham for writing the foreword, and his personal secretary,
Stephanie Wills for her help. We also appreciate the work of our friend Jim
Adair, the Victor Books senior editor who edited the book, and Mardelle Ayres,
who designed the cover.

And, finally, we wish to express our gratitude to
our children and their spouses and Pastor Charles B. Mayle and the congregation
of the Oberlin Alliance Church for their love and prayer support when we
needed it.

A.W. Tozer said, "The best book is one that starts
us on a train of thought that carries us beyond the book itself." We send
forth this book and pray that God will use it for His glory, to inspire,
encourage, and help those who read it.

O let us all from bondage flee.Let my people go,And let us all in Christ be free.Let my people go.

"I want my children to drink from Lake Erie, Jane Martin
said.

"Lake Erie? What's wrong with living in Virginia?"
her husband, Henry, shot back. "We're doing all right now."

"It's been my dream, ever since I heard General Lee
say he wouldn't be satisfied till his horse drank from Lake Erie. This is
also my ambition and goal for our family."

But to understand the long trek that took my
great-grandmother Jane Martin by foot, train, and boat from Virginia to Ohio,
where I grew up, we have to back up a few years before the Civil
War.

Discovering Our Roots

In 1828 a slave baby named Jane Robinson was born in Bedford County,
Virginia. Like many babies born in slavery,

Page 12

she was given the last name of her master, George Robinson. When
Jane was twenty years old, she was given to George Robinson's daughter Polly
as her property when Polly married Granville Pullin in 1848.

Jane lived with the Pullins for seventeen years. During
this time, Gran Pullin bought a slave named Henry Martin from his neighbor
Tom Martin, and Henry and Jane were married. One daughter was born to them
during slavery; she was three and a half years old when General Lee surrendered.
Just after Lee's surrender, another daughter named Mary was born. Mary Martin
was my grandmother.

From Grandmother Mary (later Mary Mungeon), my brother
Clarence and I heard the stories of how the newly freed Martin family, with
their small daughters, were hired out to a man named Wink Willard. The family
was very poor, and received part of Willard's crop in payment for their labor.
Willard also gave the Martins an ox; from this cow my great-grandmother Jane
eventually raised five yoke of oxen!

When little Mary was three, the Martins moved on by
ox cart and hired themselves out to a man named McHenry Williamson. Henry
and Jane worked till harvest, with the understanding that they would receive
a share of the crop. But at harvest they were run off and given
nothing.

Discouraged, hungry, and their family increasing,
the Martins settled on a farm leased by a "colored man," Israel Sanders,
who was too ill to work the land. Henry and Jane worked very hard without
tools or horses to raise a tobacco crop. At the end of the season, they harvested
eight tobacco houses full of first class tobacco! The Martins were tired
but proud and happy; two-thirds of this crop belonged to them, one-third
to Sanders. Maybe things were going to work out after all.

A few nights after harvest, they were awakened by
pounding at their door. It was a white neighbor, Mr. Overstreet. "Henry,
I was in town today at the court, and I heard that the magistrate is planning
to levy your crop to

Page 13

get Sanders' back rent, which hasn't been paid in three years."
Mr. Overstreet saw the dismay register in Henry's and Jane's eyes. "Do you
have anyone who can help you get the crop out of here?"

Henry thought. "My father lives back in Bedford County.
I could get there by morning if I had a horse."

"Well, then, take mine, man," said Overstreet. "The
magistrate will be here in a couple days."

On Overstreet's horse, Henry rode all night. By the
next night, Henry's father and some other friends drove eight long wagons
into the Sander's farm and loaded the crop.

The next day as the magistrate rode toward Israel
Sanders' farm, he met wagon after wagon of tobacco. Hurrying on to the farm,
all the magistrate found was the third of the crop that belonged to
Sanders.

The Martin family settled once again in Bedford County,
Virginia, and the family grew to eleven children. But Jane never forgot her
ambition  to go north. That was always the goal held up before the
children: "Someday you'll drink from Lake Erie."

On April 4, 1881, Jane, young Mary (who was about
sixteen years old), and Jane's stepfather, George Dickison, set out to go
north. Not yet convinced, Henry stayed behind with the other children. It
would have been a short trip by train, but black folks weren't generally
welcome on the train, so they traveled three days on foot. In Buchanan, Virginia,
they again tried to get the train, but here they feared for their very lives.
Unknown to them, a Negro had recently committed a crime, and any black face
was a threat. A crowd began to gather; chants of "Kill 'em! Hang 'em!" terrified
the three travelers.

Had it not been for Grandpa Dickison's crooked legs,
there's no telling what may have happened. But suddenly a white man pushed
his way through the crowd and said, "George?" Grandpa Dickison's face lighted
in recognition. The man was the nephew of the "other" George Dickison, the
landowner for whom Grandpa had worked as a boy

Page 14

and for whom he was named. Young George had broken his legs and
they had never set properly, and it was these crooked legs that gave away
his identity.

The nephew helped the trio get out of town to a safe
place for the night, from where they continued their journey. They arrived
at the Ohio River in Huntington, West Virginia with only seventy-five cents
between them, hardly enough to pay for passage; but a boat captain let them
ride on the lower deck of his river boat free.

When the boat nosed up to the dock in Ironton, Ohio,
about fifteen miles west of Huntington, night had fallen and sleet was pelting
their faces. They had no friends, no home, but as they climbed the hill toward
the town, Jane assured her stepfather, "Jesus is with us and will provide
for us." Then she began to sing, "Where He leads me I will
follow."

At the top of the hill they inquired about lodging
and went to the home of the town blacksmith. When they asked for a place
to stay, the blacksmith said, "My wife's sick and we got twenty boarders
 railroad men  wanting supper. Can you cook?" Jane pitched right
in, and by morning word had gotten around and five different people wanted
Jane to work for them.

In a month, she sent home twenty dollars  more
than they could have saved in a year in Virginia. Henry was finally convinced
and agreed to bring the other children.

After three months in Ironton and sending sixty dollars
and a box of clothes to her family back home, Jane followed her stepfather,
who had already gone ahead to Cincinnati; this time she and Mary paid for
first-class passage. The men working on the narrow gauge railroad needed
room and board, so Jane rented a house large enough for thirty-five boarders.
When the railroad contractors were done in Cincinnati, Jane moved to Cleveland
and opened a boarding house there.

Cleveland! Right on the shores of Lake Erie. Jane
Martin's dream had almost come true. The contractors built a

Page 15

boarding house on Paper Mill Hill, and Jane fed as many as 250
railroad men. Soon she was able to send for the rest of her family. Reunited
once more, the Martin family triumphantly went to the shores of Lake Erie
and had a drink. They had reached their goal!

And Then the Church

In two years the Martin and Dickison families, along with a third
family, the McGees, moved to Oberlin, Ohio, the home of Oberlin College,
about thirty-five miles southwest of Cleveland. In the mid-1880s, about four
hundred folk in Oberlin, nearly one-fifth of the population, were black.
Some attended the white churches, and others the two black Methodist churches
that had been organized. The Martins, Dickisons, and McGees, however, were
not Methodists by persuasion, so they began holding prayer meetings and Sunday
School in their homes. More and more people began attending these cottage
prayer meetings and it became apparent that a more formal organization was
necessary, giving birth in 1886 to the Mt. Zion Baptist Church.

My great-grandmother Jane Martin died in 1908; my
great-grandfather Henry died nine years later. My grandmother Mary, who was
about twenty when her family moved to Oberlin, had married my grandfather
Goglin Jones in Cleveland before they also came to Oberlin to live. Their
son Howard was my father. Grandmother Mary later married Matthew Lewis after
my grandfather's death, and still later married Samuel Mungeon after Matthew
Lewis died. My grandmother was a wig maker and had a shop on Main Street
in Oberlin.

An Important Heritage

What does it mean to me to piece together this history from stories
told by my grandmother Mary, contained in a

Page 16

typewritten document in the Oberlin College Archives, a book of
Oberlin history,1 and a history of the Mt. Zion Baptist Church?
It gives me a foundation. My forebearers had a strong family life, even in
slavery. With the support of family and helpful neighbors, both black and
white, they survived hard times and overcame the barriers that stood in their
way. Both mother and father contributed to the family's support and survival.
They set goals and did what they had to do to reach them. They were devout
Christian believers; their faith in God was strong. Their faith was not simply
a private matter, but they felt it important to gather with other believers
for fellowship, worship, and teaching; and they believed in the training
of children. A church rose in Oberlin, Ohio from their efforts, a lasting
heritage to future generations.

Each generation must choose for itself to keep alive
its heritage and build on it if it is solid, or to let it go. There is nothing
automatic about it, just as there is nothing automatic about our salvation.
As a teenager and a saxophonist in a local dance band, I thought the "faith
of my fathers" and church membership was good enough for me; my goal was
to become famous as a jazz musician. But it was Wanda Young, the girl I loved,
who showed me I must choose for myself to let Jesus be my Lord and Savior,
to give Him my talents and whole life to God. When I did, I also had to surrender
my plans to God  and He had different plans for me, more wonderful
than I could ever have imagined. He called me to be a preacher. When I said
yes to God, I never dreamed that would mean pastoring two churches and later
becoming the first black associate evangelist with the Billy Graham Team,
with a worldwide preaching and radio ministry.

I had to choose, but the foundation my parents and
grandparents and great-grandparents laid played an important role in that
choice. Who I am, what I believe, and what my wife and I did as parents helped
lay the foundation for the choices our children and grandchildren will
make

Page 17

for their lives and families. My wife, Wanda, also has a heritage
of which she is proud, and in her account which follows, note how her parents
influenced her life.

On Her Knees

I was born in 1923 in Oberlin, the youngest of nine children. My
parents, James and Florie Young, both enjoyed music and sang in our church
choir. They also spent evenings with neighbors and church friends, often
gathered around the pot-bellied stove in our living room. As the youngest
child, I was usually sent to bed; but more often than not, I lay on the floor
of the bedroom I shared with my older sister, Ruth, listening to the talk
and stories of the adults through the hot air register.

This is how I learned that my Italian grandfather
passed on his love of music and a respect for their individual talents to
his nine daughters and, finally, a son, my father. This is how I learned
that Grandpa Young was frustrated that there were subtle  and not so
subtle  limits put on what his children could do, just because he had
married a black woman. This is how I learned that not everyone was as safe
and protected as we were in our integrated neighborhood there in Oberlin.
I didn't understand the stories some of the adults told about "the South"
drunken mobs and lynching and burning crosses.

My father was a cook, a kind and gentle man, except
when injustice triggered a fiery temper. One day my father stomped into the
house.

"James," said my startled mother, "what on earth are
you doing home?"

I had never seen my father so steamed up. He paced
up and down the room. We knew that his boss at the restaurant, Mr. Zion,
often rode his employees hard, yelling and calling them names. This time
he had gone too far. Then, suddenly, my father sighed and dropped into a
chair. "I'd had enough, Florie. So I ... put him in the cooler."

Page 18

"Mr. Zion! In the cooler! Is he still
there?"

My father grinned and nodded.

But my mother didn't think it was funny. At her urging,
my father went back to the restaurant and opened the door to the cooler.
Mr. Zion's first words were, "You're fired!"

"You don't have to fire me," my father said, "because
I quit!" He took off his cook's coat and started out the door. The prospect
of actually losing one of his best cooks rapidly brought Mr. Zion to his
senses. I never knew what happened next, except that my father didn't lose
his job and no more was said about it.

My mother, on the other hand, seemed to have infinite
patience and never had a hard thing to say about anyone. As the youngest,
I often had her to myself after school, and I loved to help her in the kitchen
and just talk. When I pushed her with questions about why white kids seemed
to have more privileges than black kids, she just said, "Remember, Wanda,
that God made you special too. There's always going to be people who don't
like you because of the color of your skin, but that's their problem, not
yours. God made the whole world and He made people all different colors.
It just so happens that there are more white people than black people in
America, but in God's eyes they're all the same."

My mother herself treated everyone alike. My white
friends were just as welcome at our house as my black friends. When a neighbor
was sick, whether white or black, Mama took care of their children and helped
prepare food. But gradually I began to realize that the reverse was not always
true. One of my white friends took me to her house only when her mother wasn't
home. And once when I recovered from a serious bout with measles and pneumonia,
I realized that only black friends and neighbors had come to
help.

"Why, Mama?" I asked during one of our kitchen
talks.

"Wanda, honey," she said, "we can't go through
life

Page 19

wondering why other people don't do what they're supposed to do.
We just have to make sure we're doing what Jesus wants us to
do."2

Mama's love for Jesus and her obedience to God were
more important to her than petty hurts and slights. I was never encouraged
to dwell on self-pity, or to let bumps in the road keep me from the right
path. Her father  my grandfather  had been a preacher in a little
church in South Carolina when Mama was my age. "I still remember the day
I understood what my daddy was saying about our need for Jesus," she told
me one day. "It changed my life to realize I had a Savior who died for my
sins and who understood all the struggles and problems of growing up. I've
been talking to Jesus ever since."

But when I was twelve years old, my mother died of
spinal meningitis. I was devastated. For years I was angry at God for taking
her away from me. Her death seemed to take the old spitfire out of my father
as well. When my father and I were on a bus trip to Chicago to visit his
sister, two belligerent white passengers who got on in Indiana demanded that
we move to the back of the bus so they could have our seats. I knew my father
was angry, and I begged him just to move and not make a scene. We sat in
the back of the bus in stony silence for the rest of the trip.

In Chicago he talked out his anger with his sister
and her husband, but instead of pacing and blowing, he just seemed tired
and spent. Two years later he moved back to South Carolina, leaving me in
the care of my oldest brother Alden and my sister Ruth.

I didn't date much in high school  not until
I met Howard Jones, that is. Though I had seen him around school, I didn't
sit up and take notice until I heard him play his saxophone in a church service.
He and his brother, Clarence, a fine trumpeter, kept busy on weekends with
a local dance orchestra. By our senior year our future dreams began to include
each other. Howard wanted to pursue a career as a musician. All I knew is
that I loved his

Page 20

wonderful music with the band.

My brother Alden made me attend church regularly,
but I had lost personal interest since Mama died. Then a few weeks into my
senior year, the pastor of our church, Elsie Gatherer, personally invited
all the teenagers to attend a series of special meetings  a revival.
"The music is going to be great," she gently encouraged. I went with my cousin
and a couple friends and sat in the back.

The music, provided by students from Biola Institute
in California, more than met my expectations. But even more than the music,
I saw something else  these musicians were doing what they were doing,
not for themselves, but for Jesus. As each one shared a testimony, I realized
that some of them also had hurts like mine. But instead of being bitter,
they found strength and comfort in God's love. Not only that, but they seemed
to have joy in giving God their talents, their lives, their
futures.

I kept going back, and at the end of the week I made
a decision: what Jesus Christ wanted for my life was what I wanted too. And
suddenly the empty places in my life seemed to fill up. This was what Mama
had tried to tell me. I knew she was rejoicing in heaven over my decision,
and I knew that someday we would meet in heaven again.

When I tried to share my newfound joy with Howard,
however, he was accepting but didn't seem to understand the turn my life
had taken. I realized that our plans didn't seem right to me anymore. He
came to church with me, we talked ... but we were growing apart. Finally
I told him, "Howard, I love you, but I love Jesus more. Whatever I do with
my life, I want to do for Jesus."

It was painful for both of us, but I had to let Howard
go and give him  our relationship  over to God. But I prayed
hard and asked others to pray too. God is so faithful. Before the year was
out Howard had asked Jesus to be Lord of his life as well as his
Savior!

For a while, he continued on with the orchestra, even
though God had impressed him to quit. One night, however,

Page 21

his fellow musicians pressured him to attend a night club on Lake
Erie, where a famous orchestra appeared. I advised Howard not to go, but
he felt otherwise. Later Howard and his friends entered the ballroom, but
the music and the dancers did not satisfy him. Suddenly he felt as if he
were suffocating with deep conviction from the Holy Spirit. He finally stumbled
outside for a breath of fresh air. On that clear and beautiful moonlit night,
he knew that God was dealing with him. "OK, Lord," he said, "I'll quit the
band and accept Your call to preach the Gospel."

When Howard rushed to my house to tell me, I knew
then that God was knitting us together for His purpose  whatever that
might be. Together we went to Nyack Bible College and then in 1944 we married.
Howard was first called to pastor Bethany Christian and Missionary Alliance
Church in Harlem, New York; that inner-city ministry grew to include Saturday
night rallies, a radio broadcast, and a summer camp. Six years and three
daughters later we accepted a call to pastor a church in Cleveland, Ohio,
where a son and another daughter were born. Howard's radio broadcasts, which
were rebroadcast on radio station ELWA in Monrovia, Liberia, eventually led
to a three-month evangelistic tour in West Africa, which in turn in 1957
led Dr. Billy Graham to ask Howard to join his team as an associate evangelist.
God was indeed using Howard to take His Word around the world!

Our children  Cheryl, Gail, Phyllis, David, and Lisa
 are familiar with the story of my telling their father, "Howard, I
love you, but I love Jesus more." By the world's standards it was a risk;
by God's standards, obedience to His Word always results in the very best.
All of our children have opened their hearts and lives to the Lord; God in
turn has provided each one with a Christian spouse whose desire is also to
serve the Lord. As I see them establishing Christian homes and building on
the foundation we tried to provide for them, I praise God for the heritage
of a Christian family.

Page 22

My heart aches for the many children growing up in
fatherless homes today. Countless mothers struggle to be parent and provider
alone. Standing on street corners all over urban America are fathers who
feel life is a dead-end street, whose lives are at risk through crime, drugs,
poor health. I am especially sad for the young people who have never learned
how to set goals and plan for the future, but who take the quick way to money
and pleasure through drugs and sex  a shortcut that leads
nowhere.

Still I have hope. Let us remember that our God is
the God of the impossible. He is able to redeem even the most hopeless
situations. But we must allow Him to become Lord of our lives and our families.
We must return to the Bible as our guidebook and be obedient to His commands.
To our children we must pass on a Christian faith, our proud heritage, and
solid moral and educational values to give them a foundation on which to
build. In the love of Christ we must reach out to those who are hurting 
one to one, family to family, healing church to hurting
community.

Something to think about:

1. What are some of the values you pass on that your mother
or father or grandparents told you were important in life?

2. How have you encouraged your parents, grandparents, aunts
and uncles to share stories about their lives and the lives of their
relations when gathered together with your children?

3. What were the reasons for the family moves that have
happened in your family over the last two generations? How have they affected
the general welfare of your family?

Looking back through the years,There were joys and some tears.There were losses and gains;There was laughter and some pains.All is well, all is well.

James Hendrix

That the black family is struggling today is, in one sense,
nothing new. The black family in America has been under attack for 300 years.
First, families were violently uprooted against their will from their African
homeland, and carried in chains to a life of servitude in a strange land.
In many cases, husbands were separated from wives, mothers from children,
on the auction block. The conditions of slavery made it difficult for black
men to care for and protect their families. Even after emancipation, racial
discrimination, repression, and poverty inhibited many blacks from being
able to adequately support their families. In some instances, Northern cities
did not prove to be the promised land, but rather became enclaves (ghettos)
of a dispirited people, trapped in a vicious cycle of unemployment, welfare
dependency, broken homes,

Page 24

illegitimacy, crime, and delinquency. Black Americans have had
to fight every inch of the way for their civil rights.

Many would characterize black families today, especially
those of the black underclass, as disintegrating, socially disorganized,
unstable, and deficient in being able to carry out essential family functions
 in short, an interpretation that focuses on the weaknesses of the
black family situation. However, that black families have survived at
all given the overwhelming odds against them is a testimony and a witness
 not to their weakness, but to the inherent strengths of the black
family in America.

Basic Family Strengths

Albert J. McQueen, who teaches sociology at Oberlin College, has
written in a paper titled "Adaptations of the Urban Black Family" that "family
casualties and failures have occurred and will continue to occur, but ...
they should not be allowed to detract from accomplishments of heroic proportions
under ... trying circumstances."1

McQueen goes on to quote Robert B. Hill, who lists
five basic strengths of black families in his little book, Strengths of
Black Families:2

1. Strong kinship bonds. Extended family sentiments and
ties tend to be maintained, particularly among poor people. They are manifested
in a willingness to aid relatives in need and to accept both kin and nonkin
children and adult relatives into the family.

2. Strong work orientation. This is revealed in attitudinal
studies and the high proportion of working wives in husband-wife
families.

3. Adaptability of family roles. This primarily involves
egalitarian decision-making in family affairs, which has been found to be
more characteristic of black families than the popular image of matriarchy
or wife-dominance.

Page 25

4. High achievement orientation. The desire to achieve in
education, occupation, and income tends to be pronounced among parents and
their children, though it often is not matched by an equally strong sense
of efficacy or optimistic expectations of success.

5. Positive orientation toward religion. While not all blacks
are religious any more than any other segment of the population, the church
is a central institution in the black community, a bulwark for the maintenance
of family values of respectability, perseverance, and
achievement.

In the midst of a crisis that concerns us deeply,
it is important  nay, essential  to remember that crisis in the
black family is not all there is, and it was not always so. Not only
do solid black families who are successfully raising their children and passing
faith, values, and traditions exist in all social strata today, but it is
the black family itself that has been our strength through decades of adversity
from every side.

In any crisis we must first regain our footing to
see what our foundation is. If our goal is to restore the black family, we
have to know what it is we want to preserve. To go forward into the future,
we have to wisely look back at the past to know what our heritage
is.

Wise King Solomon wrote, "Where there is no vision,
the people perish" (Proverbs 29:18). We believe it is important to reclaim
the vision of family held by our parents and grandparents, so that we can
pass that vision on to our children and grandchildren.

Traditional Black Family Structure

In the hundred-year period after the end of slavery, the majority
of black families experienced basic stability, with married couples raising
their children until the children established their own families.

Page 26

The African heritage of the American black family
also placed a high value on blood ties, including other family members in
the family system. Thus, while the nuclear family has been at the
core of the black family, the extended family is also an important
strength, often including one or both grandparents and one or more unmarried
aunts and uncles or cousins living in the family unit. If a parent is lost
to death or divorce, the children are enfolded into the extended family and
raised, often by a grandparent, but also by aunts and uncles.

This commitment to family has another advantage that
is seldom acknowledged. The illegitimacy rate among African Americans is
truly at tragic proportions  over half of all births  but what
is not noticed is that relatively fewer of these babies are being aborted
than among the white population. Even when they are born to teenage moms,
more are being raised by grandparents and aunts and uncles and  the
best of their ability  the teenage moms. According to Andrew Edwards
of Cleveland State University, "Of the 1.6 million abortions performed annually
in the United States, most are obtained by young, white, unmarried women
 63 percent are age twenty-four or younger; 70 percent are white, and
81 percent are unmarried .... It should be noted that the majority of the
black community's pregnancies are within the lower socio-economic strata
 the group that has the lowest abortion rate .... Comprehensive data
suggests that blacks definitely do have more babies proportionately out of
wedlock. But whites have a larger number and a proportionately greater acceptance
of abortion as a means of birth control."3

Another form of the traditional family might be called
the augmented family  children incorporated into the family
system without benefit of blood ties or formal adoption. There is among minority
peoples a strong sense of responsibility and caring for one another even
beyond ties of blood and marriage.

Andrew Billingsley, professor of African-American
studies

Page 27

at the University of Maryland, in his book Climbing Jacob's
Ladder,4 recounts a story told by the Rev. Otis Moss, senior
pastor of the Olivet Institutional Baptist Church, Cleveland, whose mother
died when he was quite young. His father, who did his best to care for his
mother-less children, died tragically in an automobile accident a few years
later. While young Otis stared in shock at the car wreckage, a neighbor woman
came by, took him by the arm, and said, "Come home with me." There was never
anything formal or legal, but Otis grew up in this family, went to college,
and was launched into his adult life, all with the benefit of a caring
family.

These are variations which have helped make up the
strong traditional black family structure, with both fathers and mothers
(as well as other family members) providing care, passing on faith and values,
and being role models.

The Importance of Role Models

Some time ago we clipped a fine article entitled "A Thank You for
Gifts Only Parents Can Give," written by William Raspberry, the widely read
black syndicated columnist. The article gives a glimpse of the parents who
served as role models for a wise and articulate
journalist:5

Dear Mom and Dad,

Thanks for the gifts. No, not for the things you've
bought over the years, though I'm grateful for that too. What I have in mind
are those long-ago gifts that have made so much difference in my
life.

I'm thinking, for instance, of Mom's gift of the love
of language. If my writing displays any grace or rhythm, I owe it to the
fact that Mom (English teacher and amateur poet) sparked my interest in the
way words work, taught me to hear both the sound and sense of words and to
use the one to reinforce the other.

Page 28

You've probably forgotten those pre-television evenings
when we used to sit around the fire and listen as she read poetry, her own
and others': Frost and Browning, Lowell, Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson,
Whittier and Sandburg, Dunbar's dialect and even Eugene Fields and that stuff
out of "Poems Teachers Ask For."

If Mom's poetry-readings taught me style, it was Dad
(the shop-teacher pragmatist) who taught me substance. Both end tables and
arguments, he taught, were shaky and worthless unless they stood squarely
on all four legs. Both had to be planned and thought about and tested if
they were to be worthwhile....

But it isn't just my writing that has been shaped
by your gifts. My view of the world is forever influenced by Mom's passion
and Dad's cool examination. Neither of you ever resorted to name-calling,
knowing that it was better and more satisfying to alter an enemy's view,
however subtly, than to engage in ad hominem argument. And you gave me the
grace to acknowledge that even our enemies are right some of the
time.

Thanks, too, for the courage you gave me. You must
have found it painful to raise your black children in the terribly limited
environment of segregated Mississippi: the second-rate schools, the second-class
citizenship, the inability to vote (I was in college before you voted in
your first election). And yet neither of you ever dwelt on racism. I suppose
you took it for granted that we were aware of the racism that permeated
Mississippi society and took it as your duty to give us the strength and
self-confidence to prosper in that atmosphere, to make the most of our
too-limited opportunities.

As a result, my brother, my sister, and I never thought
of ourselves as hopeless victims but as masters of our own fate.

Page 29

Thanks for that.

And thanks for your emphasis on service, and on your
moral and ethical standards, an emphasis that you taught by both precept
and example. The "values clarification" nonsense they teach nowadays would
have struck you as silly. To be sure, there were moral and ethical dilemmas
to be dealt with, and you taught me how to work through them. But you also
taught me that I didn't have to work through every single decision. Some
things were simply right or wrong ....

I know it must embarrass you for me to say these things
so publicly. But I think a columnist's readers have the right to know who
he is, and how he came to be who he is.

Thanks for everything.

Role models. How many times have we heard, "It's not
what you say that influences your children; it's who you are and what you
do"? We need to apply this adage from two perspectives.

First, for ourselves, to honor those in our
families and communities who have modeled faith in God, integrity, morality,
self-esteem, hard work, and perseverance. Since we don't come from perfect
families, we may need to search for these role models who belong to us; but
they are there.

Second, for our children, to commit ourselves
to being the kind of people we want our children to be. Of course we want
our children to reach higher and go further than we have gone; but we cannot
expect our children to make up for our character weaknesses if we harbor
bitterness or anger, sit all day in front of the TV, are hypocritical, squander
time and money on drinking and partying, and never read the Bible or pray
together as a family. We live our lives, not just for ourselves, but even
more for our children and others who look up to us.

Page 30

Some things to think about and do:

1. How far back can you trace your family tree? Do your
children know about these ancestors, who they are and what they
did?

2. Plan a family reunion sometime in the near future. Listen
to the older folks. Get them to tell stories. If possible, tape-record these
conversations.

3. If your parents are still living, write them a letter
expressing thanks for some of the "gifts" they gave you. You might use the
letter by William Raspberry as a sample.

This world is one great battlefield,With forces all arrayed;If in my heart I do not yield,I'll overcome someday.

C. Albert Tindley

There is an old African proverb, "If you knock the nose,
the eye cries." No doubt this has been applied in myriad of ways, but one
thing it surely means: if some in the black community suffer, all suffer.
The black family is in crisis  possibly the biggest crisis it has faced
since mothers, fathers, and children were ripped from their African homelands
300 years ago  and all of us are affected.

Ever since the publication in 1965 of the controversial
Moynihan report on the black family, there have been ominous warnings that
the very survival of the black family is at stake. Many of these studies
and reports fail to acknowledge the past history of the traditionally strong
black family, strengths that have helped black Americans survive through
centuries of oppression and hard times. But we are not doing ourselves a
favor if we turn a blind eye to

Page 32

the reality of what is happening to the family in our midst. For
"when the nose is knocked, the eye cries."

Just as it is important to know our history and the
role of the traditionally strong black family in helping black Americans
survive and persevere in the midst of external pressures, it is important
that we understand the serious nature of the crisis that is upon us. For
it is only in understanding the cords that bound us together in the past,
and why they are unraveling now, that we will be able to do what we must
do for the sake of our children and our future.

Chicken or the Egg?

The issues affecting the family are complex and interrelated, but
they are often addressed as single issues. "The War on Drugs" or "Pro-Choice
vs. Pro-Life" dominate the headlines and political rhetoric. The abortion
issue especially is fiercely fought on both sides.

Andrew Edwards of Cleveland State University writes:
"The use of illicit drugs, teenage rebellious activity, domestic violence,
irresponsible sexual behavior, individual depression, chronic anxiety, and
certain other emotional disturbances are often termed social pathology
(or sickness or deviance). However, it is erroneous to view the above as
'social problems.' All of the above are symptoms of a problem. The
problem is FAMILY DYSFUNCTION."1

Other experts see it as the other way around. Poverty
and unemployment, decades of oppression and the resulting lack of self-esteem,
the abuse of illegal drubs  all of which impact each other  create
a combustible mixture which is seriously damaging the black
family.

Whichever came first, the chicken or the egg, isn't
as important as realizing that these are not isolated problems, nor do they
affect isolated people. These problems add up to disaster for the black family;
the family system is crumbling, and this impacts the whole black
community.

Page 33

Economics and Unemployment

That economics plays a definitive role in the stability of the
family can be seen in the following 1983
statistics:2

The working class is still the largest stratum of black families
(though the underclass is rapidly catching up). Here fully 60 percent were
husband-wife families.

In the middle class, who tend to be educated, with family incomes
between $25,000-$50,000 (1983 dollars), 83 percent were husband-wife
families!

Among the black upper-class, an overwhelming 96 percent were
husband-wife families.

Another way to say this would be that even though
only 29 percent of poor black families have both a father and mother in the
home, a healthy 79 percent of nonpoor black families are married couples!
It can be argued whether poverty is a cause or a consequence of family
dissolution, but "a significant decline in the earning power of young black
men has contributed significantly to the retreat from marriage and the rise
of illegitimacy during the last fifteen years."3

Unfortunately, in spite of emancipation, in spite
of the civil rights movement, in spite of civil rights legislation, since
1960 unemployment rates for blacks have been consistently double those for
whites  and rising. For instance, in 1985 the jobless rate for blacks
was 15.1 percent while it was only 6.2 percent for
whites.4

We cannot overlook that racism and discrimination
play a significant role in the economic picture of black
families.

Page 34

There is a great need for job-training programs and educational
reforms in city schools, but national priorities and expenditures have been
elsewhere. Also, in the last fifteen years or so we've changed from a
"hard-producing" country to a "soft-producing" country. In other words, so
many of the jobs in steel and other industries, where traditionally there
were good tradespeople working, have been lost to automation or as a result
of companies moving away. Now it's hard for anybody who doesn't have an education
or high skill training to get a good job.

Black males especially have a hard time getting jobs,
and unless there's proper employment it's going to hurt the family. All these
factors have contributed to the 2.1 million black families (30 percent) who
were below the poverty line in 1986.5

When there's not enough money coming in to pay the
rent or the mortgage, clothe all the kids, and educate them, a lot of other
things suffer too. Many of our black families cannot afford good health care.
Compared to white children, black children are twice as likely to
be born prematurely, die during the first year of life, suffer low birth
weight, have mothers who received late or no prenatal care, and mothers who
die during childbirth.6

The lack of adequate health care is one of the reasons
why so many black men, women, and children die much earlier than their white
counterparts, and it is a factor in the general progress of the black family.
If children lack proper medical attention, don't have the proper food, or
are without suitable clothes to go to school  and so many of them don't
 then how are they going to do well in school? About half of all black
children are at least one full grade behind the average white student of
the same age. An estimated one third of black students drop out of school
before finishing high school. Without a high school diploma, young blacks
find that employment prospects plunge, and the cycle spirals downward. It's
a very serious problem.

Page 35

On the other end of the scale, there are a lot of
black kids who are bright, with gifts and talents, but their families cannot
afford to send them to college. The proportion of black high school graduates
who go to college declined from 33.5 percent in 1976 to 26.1 percent in
1987.7 In our own hometown, Oberlin College, one of the first
colleges in the nation to admit blacks, has financial aid programs for African
Americans and other minority students, as do many other colleges and universities
in the country.

House majority whip William Gray, D-Pa., quit his
job in Congress so he could have more influence as head of the United Negro
College Fund, which raises money for forty-one historically black colleges.
He is also minister of Philadelphia's Bright Hope Baptist Church. Speaking
to the press, he said that there was "no greater contribution that I think
I can make to my community" than to "widen the doors of education for our
... black students."

Welfare

Government has a responsibility when it comes to the economic
well-being of its citizens, and especially those at the bottom of the ladder.
But good intentions are not always the most helpful.

For instance, we need to take a closer look at the
whole welfare system. In some cases it has been a help, and some form of
welfare should continue for those who are destitute and need a helping hand.
Some black leaders, however, think the welfare program has done more harm
than good. Being on the dole too long destroys motivation to achieve or move
ahead. Some men take advantage of women on welfare and skip out on their
responsibilities to support their children.

Many women receiving ADC (Aid to Dependent Children)
have low self-esteem. They would rather have a good job and make a decent
living. Years ago going on welfare was a secret thing, not something to be
proud of.

Page 36

There are blacks today  both men and women  who are
working to get off welfare and improve their status. Yet if they have a job,
that gets deducted from their welfare, so the motivation is lacking. It becomes
a vicious circle, the way it's structured now.

People should be helped to get off welfare. Better
to have a system where people are helped with education, childcare, and job
training to help them toward jobs. (A new bumper sticker reads, "Childcare
Not Welfare.") Both mothers and fathers would feel better about themselves
if they had a good job; families would be strengthened; all of society would
benefit. Dr. Billingsley, cited earlier, says that the most critical need
in the black community "is jobs, jobs, jobs!"

The Curse of Alcohol and Drugs

We were talking to a young black American mother recently who had
just hosted a large family reunion. When we asked how it went, she responded,
"We had a good time, a lot of family attended, and there was lots of good
food. But I think I may have made an enemy." It turned out that when some
of the guests asked where the drinks were, she said that she wasn't serving
any alcohol. One of her guests said, "Well, if there's nothing to drink here,
I'm leaving." This Christian mother was taking a stand, but it cost
her.

The availability of alcohol and drugs in the
African-American community is a serious threat to the well-being of our families.
Liquor stores are the most common form of small business, and the liquor
industry has found a new and potent product for initiating youthful drinkers:
wine coolers. Wine cooler sales increased from 150,000 cases in 1982 to
40,000,000 cases in a recent year. And although African Americans represent
only 11 percent of the population, our people purchase 30 percent of the
Scotch sold in this country. It is estimated that blacks spend $11-12 billion
annually on alcohol.8

Page 37

The problems of alcohol  addiction, abuse, loss
of employment, disintegration of the family system  has long been
documented. But recent decades have put new words in our vocabulary and new
demons in our communities: weed (marijuana), acid (LSD), heroin, cocaine,
crack, "ice" (powdered speed). In their 1986 special issue on "The Crisis
in the Black Family," Ebony magazine editors stated, "Clearly no vice
does more damage to black people's ability and willingness to fight for better
conditions in a racist society than the use of drugs, which systematically
sap young black's physical and mental strengths."9

To many social analysts and black leaders, the problem
of drug abuse represents the number-one problem confronting the black community.
Not only is an entire generation at risk because of the "drug cancer," through
addiction and health-related issues such as AIDS, "but illegal drug use is
either directly or indirectly related to much of the crime that plagues the
black community."10 A high percentage of robbery and assault is
perpetuated by addicts who need cash to support their habit.

In many of the gangs which infect our inner cities,
such as the Crips in Los Angeles and the Stones in Chicago, the terms "gang
member" and "drug dealer" are almost synonymous.11 Competition
for the drug market has increased deadly violence between rival gangs, with
many innocent young people and men and women caught in the
crossfire.

Most insidious, drug trafficking has moved into our
schools. While gang members in general are not always easy to identify (unless
they deliberately wear gang colors or distinguishing items of clothing),
say teachers, those who deal drugs often are. "They wear gold, drive expensive
cars (or bicycles, depending on their age), sometimes keep their drugs in
school in gym bags, and carry electronic pagers, which let them know when
a customer wants to buy drugs ... 'For the young kids growing up in
poverty,

Page 38

seeing the older kids with sudden wealth becomes a stimulus for
them to become involved in drugs,' " said Lorain, Ohio, Detective Tom
Cantu.12

Eleanor Holmes Norton, formerly the chairperson of
the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in the Carter administration
and now the District of Columbia delegate to Congress, agrees. "Kids are
very vulnerable to the drug culture, which is the only culture they see around
them  at least in the hard-core ghettos." But "there is a special danger
for those children who have yet to exist: We are passing drugs through our
gene pool," Norton adds.

"Now that we see drugs like crack, and women exchanging
sex for crack, we are seeing an epidemic of crack babies, cocaine babies,
boarder babies. That is the destruction of our community. Many children are
being born into the world who will never have a chance for a decent life
and will pass that [disadvantage] on to others  that is new, and it
is intolerable."13

Everyone has his own opinion on the source of the
problem. A Washington, D.C. assistant police chief said, "[Youths] want the
material things we say people need to be somebody, and they become somebody
in the drug trade."14

A 29-year-old Los Angeles cab driver who sees a lot
of the underside of life, commented: "When a youth decides to sell drugs,
that means they've given up on life. It means they don't care past today.
They aren't concerned about what their parents or anyone else might
think."15

Ben Gray, an Omaha TV producer who set up a job-training
program for gang members, believes drugs are just a symptom. He blames
institutional racism and double standards. "These kids feel locked out of
the system," said Gray, whose solution is to "give them a taste of being
inside." But the lure of drug money is almost impossible to counter. "What
alternative have I got for them?" he says. "What job have I got for a high
school dropout that

Page 39

will allow him to get up at noon and make $300 in the
afternoon?16

According to a writer in an Akron, Ohio newspaper
article, local experts in juvenile delinquency blame the following for the
increase in violent offenses, drug trafficking, and gang
activity:

Parents who sell drugs, use drugs or drink to excess.

The absence of parenting. Many parents don't know where their children
are; many children don't know where their parents are.

Homes in which neither parent shows love for each other or the
children.

Domestic violence and divorce.

Lack of supervision. Children who are left alone too much and parents
who are seldom home. When they are home, they don't set limits. Children
never learn to be accountable for their actions.

Sexual, emotional and physical abuse and neglect of
children.17

An Educational Disaster

Obviously, the value system has broken down, not only in our homes
and churches, but in our schools as well. And these institutions are all
interrelated. What is happening in our homes and churches affects the schools;
what's happening in the schools affects the family.

When we were growing up, our dad knew when it was
time for report cards! He'd look at the date on the calendar and say, "Howard
and Clarence, it's report card time," and there was no avoiding giving an
account. Our parents wanted us to excel as students and someday go to college.
They cared enough to keep on top of monitoring our progress in consultation
with our teachers. Wanda had the same experience. Our parents insisted that
we learn how

Page 40

to read and speak properly, and also shared with us interesting
events in history. We heard this not only at home, but also from the adults
at church.

Dr. Carson's Story

In his challenging book, Gifted Hands,
Dr. Ben Carson,
the renowned black neurosurgeon, tells the story of how a ghetto kid from
Detroit, Michigan, with an uncontrollable temper and a total failure in school,
was able to find success in life.18

Dr. Carson lauds his Christian mother, who, with a
third-grade education, prayed to God for wisdom to help her encourage and
motivate her sons to excel in education and achieve outstanding goals in
life.

In the home, she limited her sons to only three TV
programs a week. She required that they visit the library and read three
good books each week on various subjects and report back to her. God eventually
rewarded the prayers, patience, and loving concern of this dedicated mother.
Ben Carson later graduated with honors from Yale and the University of Michigan
Medical School. In 1987 Dr. Carson became a world famous neurosurgeon for
the part he played in the miraculous operation on the separation of Siamese
twins.

Today, not yet forty, he is the
Director
of Pediatric Neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland.
He's an extremely busy man, but this Christian doctor, a role model, and
family man challenges young people across the country to become Christians,
get a good education, and honor God in using their gifts and talents for
worthwhile pursuits in life. Dr. Carson's mother is also a good example for
other parents to follow in rearing their children.

But there are a lot of parents today who don't seem
to care what their kids do academically. Sometimes this is because they have
not had an education and therefore

Page 41

don't know its value. Sometimes this is because they have been
discouraged because the local school system is so poor that it seems impossible
to get a good education. And some parents may have concluded that education
is not a good bargain  it's too much trouble for the few opportunities
that await at the other end.

Unfortunately, peer influence also plays a role. Black
students who achieve academically are sometimes accused by their peers of
"acting white." It's seen as cool to skip class, to shrug off academic success.
But as someone has said, "If you think education is expensive, try
ignorance!"

The lack of motivation in many homes is truly sad.
One finds that far too many black young people do not have any aspirations
to become outstanding in various fields of professional careers. They perceive
that their mothers and fathers are not role models or achievers so why should
they want to be something.

Val Jordan, who works with the Navigators' Chicago
Urban Ministry, has noticed the same thing. At Wendell Phillips High School
there are a high percentage of the students who have never met and talked
to an attorney, a doctor (except for medical visits), or a business executive.
To them a business man or woman is maybe their landlord or the person who
owns the local store. TV images are their only exposure to such professions,
and they seem impossibly out of reach.

This lack of inspiration has taken its toll. In 1986
only four blacks in the United States earned Ph.D.s in mathematics, and in
all fields of science and engineering, fewer than thirty Ph.D.s were awarded
that year to African Americans.19 Dr. Walter Massey, president
of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, says, "There
are few black scientists with Ph.D.s because there are few blacks with bachelor's
degrees, because there are few blacks who finish high school who are interested
in science."20

Page 42

A few years ago, the National Commission on Excellence
in Education released a scathing report which stated that 13 percent of all
17-year-olds and 40 percent of all minority youth were functionally
illiterate.21 In the 10 largest urban cities, the high school
dropout rate for black males is 72 percent.22 Education, which
has always been seen as the key to success for a minority people struggling
against racism and discrimination, is in danger of rusting in the
lock.

There have been and continue to be obstacles of
discrimination and lack of opportunity, but what our kids need is inspiration,
someone to help them see that becoming somebody is possible via an
understandable and achievable series of steps from where they are to their
desired career goal. And in most cases those steps are education.

The availability of quality schools is essential for
good education. Parental involvement in school government, adequate instructional
resources, and excellent teachers are all essential for quality education.
But one of the commonly overlooked ingredients is the curriculum. It has
been well demonstrated that children learn fastest when information is presented
in culturally familiar contexts and styles. However, in recent years this
has created a dispute. For instance, should they be taught in the familiar
dialect, or should standard English be used? And because much curriculum
often has a bias toward European culture, some people don't want their children
taking world history courses or English literature. They want them to take
African history courses and study literature by notable African
Americans.

In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the school board has set
up two African-American "immersion" schools that are specifically designed
for black males  one for the elementary level and the other at the
middle-school level. To avoid the Supreme Court's 1954 "separate-but-equal"
prohibition, the schools will be open to whites. But in content they
will

Page 43

(1) emphasize black heroes and their contributions, (2) use teaching
methods that allow for the different learning styles of black males, and
(3) take into account the many home situations without fathers present and
provide male "mentoring."23

Compensating for the deplorable educational conditions
is a good idea, but it is possible to go to extremes. If curriculum needs
are changing, it needs a balance for both black and white students. We don't
want to produce children who are well-informed in black culture but still
unable to compete in broader society. Shelby Steele, a black university
professor, says, "When you group people by their race ... there is a secondary
message: that one ought not to identify with the very mainstream that ultimately
you want them to succeed in. What you need is the opposite approach 
to, as soon as possible, try to mitigate their isolation and have them identify
with their Americanness."24

A few of the kids who come to the Good Samaritan Center
in Cleveland, Ohio and the Christian Outreach Summer Camps, a ministry to
all races, can quote the lyrics of the popular rap songs, good and bad ...
but don't know how to read or speak proper English. We find that they are
growing up without wanting to learn. All they care about is having a good
time  no discipline and industry; just take it easy. It's amazing,
however, the transformation that takes place in them when they encounter
Jesus Christ, the Savior, who gives them motivation, hope, and a new lease
on life. Today, unless young people receive a quality education, balanced
with moral and spiritual values, we're in danger of losing the next generation
to apathy, hopelessness, and despair.

Breakdown of Community Support

Along with the pressures on the family from external sources has
been the breakdown of community support.

Page 44

When we were growing up, children had many good role models. The
people in the community took an interest in all the children on the block.
If someone else's daddy or grandmother saw you doing something that wasn't
right, they had the permission of your parents to intervene and say, "Don't
you do that, or I'm going to tell your parents!" We were afraid to step out
of line, because sooner or later Dad or Mom would hear about it, and we'd
get in trouble.

I remember the times when our dad used to take my
brother, Clarence, and me down to the railroad tracks to see the trains go
by. We were utterly fascinated. But he also repeatedly gave us a stern warning.
Looking us in the eye he said, "I never want you boys to play down on those
tracks, because my brother  your Uncle Harry  was killed by a
train years ago." We solemnly promised.

One day when we finished playing a game of marbles,
some of us boys just happened to wander down by the railroad tracks. I had
two pockets filled with marbles and I was feeling good. Sitting there was
a pumping car which had been left on a dead track. Oh, boy, we had always
envied those railroad men who flew down the tracks on those pumping cars.
It was off on a side track that wasn't used, so we had the time of our lives
pumping that handle up and down to make the car go.

Unknown to us, someone saw us down on those tracks
and went to my father and said, "Just thought you'd like to know your sons
are down on the tracks playing with the pumping car." In the midst of our
play, we heard a familiar shrill whistle from the top of the embankment.
We knew it was Dad. We brought that thing to a screeching halt and jumped
off. "Clarence, Howard ... come up here," he said.

We flew up that hill. "Didn't I tell you not to play
on the tracks?" he said.

"But, Dad," we protested, "it's a dead
track."

"I know," he said. "But you disobeyed me." He had
a belt in his hands, and he had us hopping all the way home,

Page 45

right into the house, as he lashed out at us. And when he got through,
I didn't have a single marble left in my pockets.

We got the message. We were taught to obey, and the
community backed up our parents. Unfortunately, we've lost that community
spirit today. Instead, we pride ourselves on our individualistic society.
We don't feel responsible for one another; what someone else's kids do "is
none of our business." Parents lack the support of the broader community,
and children have generally lost respect for the authority of other
adults.

But of course this kind of community influence on
our children demands family influence, and the black family, per se, has
been struggling internally as we will see in the next chapter.

Some things to think about and do:

1. List the three pressures you feel affect your family
most and explain what they threaten to do to your family.

2. List the three pressures that affected your family of
origin when you were a child. How have these issues changed or remained the
same? Explain why you think either has happened.

3. For each pressure your family currently faces, what would
be the most practical and likely way of finding release from that
pressure?

Picture a family in one of America's inner cities. The father
has been unemployed for five years. An unskilled worker, his job at the post
office was automated; he has since been unable to find work. Two more babies
have been added to the family, making three. In his state of residence,
two-parent families are not able to receive ADC (Aid to Dependent Children)
unless the primary wage-earner is disabled. A single parent, on the other
hand, is able to get welfare. Discouraged and angry that he can't support
his family, he walks away. Hating himself, this father hits the bottle to
ease some of the pain. But the pain doesn't go away, so he moves on. Maybe
in some other town, some other place, he can start over.

In the meantime, his sons are growing up without a
father. They have no one to teach them the responsibilities

Page 47

of becoming a man, or what it means to be a husband and father.
School is hard. What does it have to do with real life anyway? Most of the
older kids they know drop out of high school. These young men hang out on
the street; no one has a job. Some do have money, however; it comes from
selling drugs. The boys look up to the guys selling drugs; they have cars,
clothes, parties. Soon the boys are acting as lookouts or passing drugs for
older guys in exchange for dollars. Mom looks the other way. She hates what
she knows is going on ... but the money helps a lot.

The daughter longs for love and attention from the
one person she doesn't have  her father. Suddenly she's growing up;
boys are noticing. A handsome guy who hangs out down the block tells her
she's beautiful; he can give her a good time. He says he loves her, can make
her happy. She basks in the love and attention of a man. Then at fifteen,
she discovers she's pregnant. The guy cools. "That's your problem, baby;
get an abortion." Abortions cost money she doesn't have, and besides, she
doesn't feel right about it. Mama yells a lot but sticks with her daughter.
Another mouth to feed ... but a baby is a baby. The daughter drops out of
school. Unable to afford prenatal care, the baby boy is born with a low birth
weight. Sixteen and a mother; no diploma, no hope for a decent job, a baby
to care for. She goes on welfare.

The baby boy grows up with a mama and a grandma, no
man in the house  at least, no man who stays very long. What will change
things for him? He can't compete with middle-class society for jobs; he has
no role models that suggest he could become a lawyer or teacher or dentist.
But, hey, he can become a man; he can make babies. He gets a girl
pregnant when he's seventeen. By the time he's twenty, he has four children
 all by different girls. He stops in to see them once in a while, and
brags about this prowess to his friends. "Hey, I'm a daddy four times!" He
doesn't contribute to their support. He's following the only path he knows:
hanging out, looking out for number one,

Page 48

finding comfort and pleasure in drinking, girls, a little dope.
He pulls a few jobs to get survival money  a mom-and-pop grocery, a
gas station. One night he's unlucky and gets arrested. Unfortunately, he
has a gun, something he carries "for protection." At age twenty-two 
when most white youths are graduating from college and landing that first
important job  he is in prison.

If even one family were caught in this vicious cycle,
it would be cause for concern. But in 1986, over 2 million black families
had no member with a secure niche in a work force, what the U.S. Bureau of
Census calls the "non-working poor." The media calls them the emerging black
underclass. Whatever they are called, most of these families are at
risk.

Obviously, the crisis in the family is not limited
to the black community, or even the poor. Fatherless children, pregnant
teenagers, divorce, drugs, AIDS, child abuse, abortion  these tragedies
cut across all economic levels, races, and classes in America. Other social
forces are at work: permissive attitudes toward sexuality; scorn for religious
values; a breakdown in community; and an increase in individualism and
materialism. But coupled with a long history of racism and poverty, the impact
on the black family in particular is devastating.

Let's look further at some of the issues affecting
today's African-American families.

Loss of Our Spiritual Freedom

First and foremost, we have a crisis in the black family because
we have gotten away from biblical principles. Families no longer read the
Bible together, and many don't go to church. The name of Jesus has become
nothing more than a swear word. Instead of doing the right thing according
to the Word of God, each person simply looks out for number one. Most don't
have any worthy standards; they don't have any rules to go by.

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This void has allowed secular humanism, a godless
philosophy which is spreading across the country, to invade our homes, schools,
communities, and churches. This has helped create a problem for all American
families, especially black families.

Remember the story about the frog and the hot water?
If you put a frog in hot water, it will immediately jump out. But if you
put the same frog in cool water and gradually increase the temperature, the
frog will sit there blinking its eyes happily while it stews to
death.

Without the foundation of the Word of God, the standards
and morals in our society have been gradually slipping away, until we are
in a state of danger that most don't even seem to notice. But the effects
of "turning up the heat" of moral decay are destroying our families and crippling
the next generation.

Even when children are taught values at home, they
go to school where teachers don't believe in or aren't (or think they aren't)
allowed to teach Judeo-Christian principles. The fact that the Pilgrims came
to America seeking religious freedom has been deleted from some history books;
the role that Christianity has played in many of the great reform movements
is ignored; even the work of
Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr. and other black leaders is not honored by some, or is
seen as insignificant. (Fortunately, the great hue and cry by some Christian
leaders about some of these imbalanced views is pressing some textbook publishers
to reconsider.)

Solid values of right and wrong have been replaced
with so-called "neutral values." When fifth-grade children report that they
can't talk about God at their school because they'll get in trouble, they
have been powerfully intimidated by a very sad value system. Because of the
permissiveness that's allowed in the schools, peer pressure is stronger on
our children than adult authority. Even the church has failed to be a bulwark
against the eroding values of our day. Too many church members  and
ministers too 

Page 50

say one thing on Sunday and live another the rest of the
week.

The sad thing is that historically a strong spiritual
foundation has helped the black family  and thus us as a people 
survive decades and centuries of difficult challenges.

The effect of changing values jolted Wanda and me
when we returned to the States in 1964 from Monrovia, Liberia, where we had
lived for six years at radio station ELWA, a beautiful location along the
coast of the Atlantic Ocean. As a family we produced radio programs, and
I frequently conducted evangelistic crusades throughout Liberia and other
countries in Africa. These various ministries were under the auspices of
the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association.

In a sense, our children had lived a sheltered life
in Africa. But back in New York and then in Ohio, they struggled with what
they perceived to be our old-fashioned rules and what "all the other kids"
were doing. When we told them they had to be in at a certain hour, they resisted
at times. Many of their friends had no curfews. As we became aware of various
families' situations, some of these homes seemed stable enough (the father
was present and providing for the family), but there were no established
standards. And some kids came from homes where the father  and sometimes
the mother  was an alcoholic.

Even though we felt under a lot of pressure, we continued
to build our family life on the Word of God, with daily Bible reading and
prayer. We wanted to know who our children's friends were, what they were
doing, and when they'd be home. We encouraged involvement with church activities
and youth events. Alcohol, profanity, and questionable literature had no
place in our home.

One boy told our girls, "You know, you're blessed
to have such a family. I wish I had a family like that. My old man doesn't
care." This boy, who was not a Christian, could see the benefits of a Christian
family.

Our three oldest girls had been singing together for
several years.

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Everyone knew them as the Jones Sisters Trio, recording artists,
who sang in Billy Graham crusades, and appeared on the "Day of Discovery"
TV programs. During this time a young man said, "Cheryl, Gail, Phyllis ...
look, please don't mess up, because everyone is waiting for the Jones sisters
to fall." The girls didn't realize that other young people were watching
their conduct as Christians. It was a little scary, but in a way it was good
for them too.

From our experience in counseling families, we know
a lot of kids may rebel, but deep down in their hearts they would like to
have someone say no to them when they head in a wrong direction. Setting
limits can show children that they are loved and cared for. They want to
know that Someone is in control. They want purpose and meaning in their lives,
the kind of purpose that can only come through a personal relationship with
Jesus Christ. When this spiritual foundation is missing, the family has no
center on which to build, no guiding map to chart its path through the troubling
waters of our times.

Breakdown of the Traditional Family

Hand in hand with the loss of our spiritual foundation is the breakdown
of the traditional family. When we say the "traditional" family, we mean
it in the sense of the biblical structure where a husband and wife are legally
married and are responsible for the children who result from this union.
Some would define traditional family too narrowly  with only the father
as breadwinner and the mother as homemaker. But given the historical role
of the black family (which often includes extended family members or substitute
parents) and economic pressures (which often means that more than one adult
must work to support the family), we feel there are variations of family
that nonetheless are rooted in the biblical concept: husband and wife, committing
themselves before God, with the support of

Page 52

family and church, to create a new family unit.

Unfortunately, the concept of "family" is being stretched
today to include all sorts of aberrations. Newsweek's special on the
family (Winter/Spring 1990), for instance, included examples of gay and lesbian
partners raising children, giving them unprecedented new "respectability."
The primary problem in the breakdown of the family, however, is that both
men and women have been avoiding or abandoning marriage in record numbers
in recent years. According to the University of Maryland's Dr. Andrew
Billingsley, "This behavior constitutes the leading edge of the contemporary
black family crisis."1

This is a fairly recent phenomenon. As late as 1960,
78 percent of all black families with children were headed by married couples.
The rapid decline of two-parent families in the black community in the last
thirty years can be seen in the following
statistics:2

1960: 78 percent of black families with children were headed by
married couples.

1970: Only 64 percent were headed by married couples.

1975: Only 54 percent

1980: Only 48 percent

1985: Only 40 percent

1990: Only 37 percent (estimated).

Or to put it another way, in 1960 only 22 percent
of black families had only one parent in the home. But in 1980 single-parent
families outnumbered two-parent families for the first time. In 1990
the number of single-parent families had jumped to 63 percent.

Although many of these statistics include families
disrupted by divorce, an alarming number did not include marriage at all.
At the end of the '80s, more than half of all black babies were born out
of wedlock.3 And 60 percent of all black families had no father
in the home.

This is indeed alarming. First, children in black,
female-headed

Page 53

families are five times as likely to be on welfare than those in
intact black families.4 More often than not this means poor health
care, substandard housing, inferior education resulting in poor motivation,
dependence on welfare, unemployment. Second, "the predicament of female-headed
households feeds on itself because boys (and girls) raised in such families
may have no role model for marriage and fatherhood."5 The consequences
of growing up fatherless are just beginning to be understood by those concerned
about the family. Cornell's Urie Bronfenbrenner has linked "father absence"
to many problems common among black youths in the inner city, such as "low
motivation for achievement, inability to defer immediate rewards for later
benefits, low self-esteem, susceptibility to group influence ... and juvenile
delinquency."6

Dr. Louis Sullivan, U.S. Secretary of Health and Human
Services, wrote a provocative article in USA Today, June 14, 1991
entitled "Time to Get Dads Back into U.S. Families." Note a portion of what
he said:

Too many American fathers have decided it is too rough for them
to handle. So literally millions of our nation's children  rich and
poor alike  live with the anger, loneliness, and insecurity produced
by absentee fathers.

Some of the fathers have neglected to form a family
in the first place  households headed by a single mother have doubled
since 1960. In other instances, divorce, separation, neglect, abandonment,
or workaholism deprive children of their fathers.

It is well understood that father absence is common
among the poor. Often overlooked is that many children of our middle and
wealthy classes experience the problem also  not from a poverty of
means, but from a poverty of parenting. They have material advantages, but
many are suffering emotional deprivation and actual neglect....

Page 54

It is not acceptable when fathers abandon their children,
either in fact or in attitude. The father who acts more attached to his golf
game or his TV program than to his children needs to rethink his priorities.
And we certainly cannot stand idly by while the negative father-substitutes
 drug kings, gang leaders and other insincere, false roleplayers 
prey on our vulnerable youth.

We must work to get our fathers back into our American
families. At the same time, it is vitally important for caring adults to
be father substitutes where families have not been established or cannot
be restored. Through mentoring relationships we can instill important values
and teach accountability to youngsters who are at risk.

Through our combined efforts, we can weave a new social
climate where children will be nurtured, where adolescents will be guided
and cared for and where our young people will be prepared for adulthood by
giving them equal measures of love, discipline, challenge, and
responsibility.

This is not an indictment against single women and
mothers, many of whom are struggling valiantly against overwhelming odds
to bring up their children. It is an indictment against our political priorities
that pours more money into weapons than into job training and opportunities.
It is an indictment against our society's pervasive permissiveness of sexual
activity apart from marriage and general negligence of stressing the importance
of the father role. It is also an indictment against the church and Christian
community that among our own members and families we have failed to teach
and communicate God's idea for marriage, committed and faithful sexual
relationships between men and women, and the importance of the family in
nurturing, caring for, and training our young.

Some people are actually saying, "We don't need the
family.

Page 55

The whole idea of marriage and the family is for the birds. You
do what you want to do. We'll do our own thing." This attitude has led to
promiscuous sex, couples just living or shacking up together, serial partners,
artificial insemination of single women, or couples choosing careers, wealth,
and freedom over the responsibilities of parenthood. Probably the most
devastating result of this libertarian attitude is the millions of babies
who have been aborted, and the millions more who are growing up without the
benefit of married parents who are committed to each other and their children
in love.

We want to lift our voice in defense of the traditional
family because there are many anti-Christian forces working to destroy it.
This is where we stand, because God's Word does not change. Jesus told the
Pharisees that it was only because of the hardness of people's hearts that
Moses' Law permitted divorce. "But," He said, "at the beginning of creation
God 'made them male and female.' 'For this reason a man will leave his father
and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.'
So they are no longer two, but one. Therefore what God has joined together,
let man not separate" (Mark 10:6-9).

God hasn't changed His mind about marriage, and He
had a pretty good idea to start with. He created us for marriage, commitment,
faithfulness, and love. This has been and always will be the core of a strong
family, and we're happy to find happy African-American Christian families
across the country.

Children Having Children

In discussing the effects of poverty on the family, we come to
a major concern in our community: children having children. Teen pregnancy
is a leading cause of poverty among African Americans. At their age, these
young mothers are undereducated and lack job skills. The fathers, also, are
not prepared to take on the responsibilities of

Page 56

supporting a family. Though welfare kicks in to support mother
and child, it perpetuates a vicious cycle.

What are some of the causes of the epidemic of teen
pregnancy? Some might place the whole blame on the general hopeless condition
of the black underclass. Poverty, unemployment, racism  these certainly
take their toll. But, says Georgia L. McMurray, president of a New York
consulting firm and visiting professor in social policy at Fordham University,
"Among African-Americans, 'hard times' is not a new phenomenon. What is new
is the change in expectations for personal responsibility, not only in black
culture, but also in the U.S. society as a whole. Moreover, the
destigmatization of premarital sex and bearing children without marriage
may have as equally devastating an effect as the lack of a good job,
of whether to marry, even to be responsible for the consequences of sexual
activity [italics added].

"Based upon several studies, certain at-risk groups
among adolescents can be pinpointed," McMurray continues. "For example, girls
who have school problems  poor achievement, poor discipline, truancy
 and whose families receive public assistance tend to be at highest
risk of pregnancy. This seems to hold true of males as well." An additional
critical factor is that black youths, like their white counterparts, "seem
to be cultivating new and perhaps libertarian views towards sexual activity
and personal responsibility that do not augur well for the future development
of black families." Studies have also shown that "girls willing to entertain
the idea of pregnancy were two to three times more likely to bear a
child."7

Christian parents, pastors, and educators, sit up
and listen! What greater challenge do we need to lift up the vision of sexual
abstinence until marriage (i.e., true sexual responsibility)? This is one
of the great weaknesses of the approach to sex education so prevalent in
our public schools where the attitude often is: "We hope you delay sexual
activity, but if you are sexually active, be 'responsible' and practice 'safe
sex' " (i.e., use contraceptives).

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The contraceptive message is not stemming the tide
of teenage pregnancies in our nation. The Alan Guttmacher Institute (formerly
the research arm of Planned Parenthood) originally estimated that there would
be two to three hundred fewer pregnancies per thousand clients served by
school-based clinics dispensing contraceptives to teenagers. Instead, researchers
writing for the Wall Street Journal found that as the number of teenage
clients increased, there were fifty to one hundred more pregnancies per thousand
clients.8 When expectations are that "everybody is doing it" and
"responsible sex" is equated with using condoms, teenagers who might choose
to wait feel more and more isolated and alone.

What is needed is a change in attitude, a change in
the heart. We need to celebrate God's idea for sex: He created it, it is
right, it is good  in the context of committed married love, between
a man and a woman capable of caring for any children created as a result
of the union. Yes, let's tell our young people that sex is great! But like
all good things, it can be used as a gift of God ... or abused. And those
who suffer most are the children, born to parents who are barely more than
children themselves.

Some of the studies mentioned by Georgina McMurray
have also explored inhibiting factors on teenage pregnancy  those
influences that help teenagers say no to premarital sex. What are these factors?
(1) Close parental supervision, (2) a high-quality relationship
with their parents, and (3) religion. Also, teenagers who want
to go to college and plan ahead for their future tend to have dramatically
lower birthrates. Setting goals, looking to the future, being aware of
opportunities for further education, training, and jobs are all positive
steps for young people.

This is important. This is something we parents and
Christian adults in the black community can do for our own children. Of course,
economics and racism and social mores impact our kids. But we can't sit around
waiting for

Page 58

the world to change. We have to begin where we are  with
our own children in our own homes and churches.

A word of hope and caution: though the risk factors
are greatly increased, teen pregnancy does not have to be a dead end. Counseling
for the teenagers (the teenage mother and father) and their parents
can help them work through many of the emotional stresses and decisions that
need to be made. Direct intervention programs which assist teen parents in
health care for their child, parenting skills, child care, finishing high
school, and developing job skills can greatly reduce the number of teen parents
who permanently end up as part of the underclass.

The Plight of the African-American Male

"It ain't easy being green," sings Kermit the Frog, but it's a
lot easier than being a black male in these days. For instance:

There are well over 3 million black men who either can't find work
or are working and not making enough money to sustain a
family.9

The leading cause of death of black males between the ages of fifteen
and twenty-four is homicide.10 And they are ten times more likely
to be murder victims than whites.11

Nationwide, black men represent 46 percent of state prison inmates
but only 6 percent of the U.S. population.12 (All blacks comprise
11 percent of the population.)

Among black men who are in their twenties, 23 percent are incarcerated
or on probation or parole.13

In the ten largest urban cities, the high school dropout rate for
black males is 72 percent.14

Only 2.7 percent of African-American men attend a four-year
college.15

These sad statistics  and possibly the fact that black
men

Page 59

have a lower life expectancy than their white counterparts 
have led one social scientist to estimate that there is only one
available black male per five unmarried black females. The result
is that about 47 percent of black families currently are single-parent homes
headed by women in contrast to the 1880s when 84 percent of rural black families
and 72 percent of urban black families were father-headed
households.16

How we respond to these problems will be the test
for us as men. Dr. Nelson Onyenwok, of the Center for the Study of the Black
Male at Albany State College in Georgia, says, "We intend to counter the
things that are being written and said about black men ... Reciting negative
statistics does not encourage us."17 True, it's not very encouraging,
but the solution must be more than objecting to the statistics because they
don't make us feel good. We must become agents of change!

The obvious question is, how have we come to this
sad condition? Here are a few possible causes.

Unemployment, the welfare system and loss of self-esteem.
We have already mentioned the effect of unemployment and the welfare system
on the whole family, but it has a special impact on African-American men.
Cleveland Municipal Court Judge Ron Adrine says that "a lot of black men
... feel that they have no legitimate hope of ever achieving the American
Dream. Therefore, they have selected not to run the rat race, because they
start off on the losing end."18

The notion that fathering children is a symbol of male
prowess. With much of what it means to be a man in America seemingly
unattainable to the black underclass, young black men prove their manhood
however they can  regardless of the consequences. John Denson, ex-offender,
says that in his neighborhood, "you wasn't a man until you got arrested.
We looked forward to it."19 For others it is alcohol or drugs
or gang affiliation. But the most common rite of manhood is "making
babies."

Page 60

The Rev. Ron Williams, pastor of the Church of the
Brethren, Cleveland, Ohio, says, "Many of our young people regardless of
race or background have no direction, correction, or purpose in their lives,
and I believe much of the fault lies with men who want to father children
but not be a father to them ... As long as boys and girls and men and women
want the thrill of intimacy but not the responsibility for the results of
their actions, abortion clinics will continue to thrive, and those children
that are born will continue to have to do the best they can, raising
themselves."20

The inadequate number of positive male role models. Dr.
Spencer H. Holland, director of the Center for Educating African-American
Males at Morgan State University in Baltimore, claims that "women raise sons,
not men." And because of the absence of positive male role models in the
lives of many black boys, Holland charts what he considers is a human tragedy.
Young black boys begin school eagerly, but by the time they are in the fourth
grade, they shut down. Holland says, "Only an African-American male can teach
an African-American boy what it means to be an African-American man. A white
man can help, but woman can't do the job."21 Therefore, Holland
has started Project 2000 in which he recruits black men not only to teach
but to work on a volunteer basis with young black boys in the classroom.
Holland says, "It is unreasonable to expect African-American boys to want
to become doctors, lawyers, or Indian chiefs if there aren't any around
them."22

Failure of society to stress the importance of the father's
role. Socially we are caught in a bind between upholding the model of
the two-parent family and the necessity of supporting and encouraging single
parents in their situation. "We know that children need intact families that
include fathers, but we fear to say it lest we appear to be blaming hard-pressed
single mothers for the very problems they are struggling to
overcome."23

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Author and social scientist George Gilder has said
that "only fathers can support families, reliably discipline teenage boys,
and lift a community from poverty. The idea that current welfare mothers
can do it while the government raises their children is incredibly
naive."24 And yet many single mothers, struggling valiantly to
keep their families together, resent any implication that their efforts aren't
good enough. Though the feeling is understandable, men pick up the not-so-hidden
message: that they aren't needed.

This message is reinforced by radical elements in
the feminist movement (primarily among white feminists). If men and women
are really the same (except for a few biological differences), if a woman
can do everything a man can do, why does a woman need a man in the home?
This is not to negate some of the important gains won by the women's movement.
A lot of false stereotypes have been rightly dispelled in recent years. It
is good that the workplace has been opened to women, and it is good that
men have been encouraged to be more involved with their children at home.
But what has suffered is the definition of a husband's and father's role
in the family with sufficient distinction and importance to keep him from
walking off.

Some women who have been abused by fathers, brothers,
or uncles or abandoned by partners fail to establish healthy relationships
with men. Children growing up in such a male-hostile environment pick up
the message that a father in the home is not essential or even desirable,
and they are much more likely to duplicate the single-parent
model.

In his book Biblical Faith and Fathering, John
Miller points out how tenuous the father's role is in the family. For the
nine months of pregnancy, during the travail of birth itself, and during
the first period of life after birth, the mother is absolutely essential.
In all this, she bonds with the child and the child with her, and there is
never

Page 62

any question about who the mother is. But the same is not true
for the father. After impregnation, his presence is not physically required.
In fact, unless the mother is faithful and truthful, there may be no obvious
certainty who the father is.25 His importance to the family is
much more emotional and spiritual, and that can be very easily upset if he
is denied a place of significance in the family.

Lest we despair of the plight of the African-American
male, we need to remember: most black men are not in prison, they
are not drug dealers, they are not homosexuals, they have not
left their families, and they are employed. But we would do well to listen
to columnist William Raspberry who wrote:

If I could offer a single prescription for the survival of America,
and particularly of black America, it would be: restore the
family.

And if you asked me how to do it, my answer 
doubtless oversimplified  would be save the boys ...

We can't rescue America's families unless we make
up our minds to save the boys.26

Some things to think about and do:

1. Which of the issues mentioned in this chapter 
loss of our spiritual foundation, breakdown of the traditional family structure,
children having children, plight of the black male  come closest to
home for you in defining the crisis points in your own life and
family?

2. If you are a black male, who have been your role models
as to what it means to be a man, and what has their example taught
you?

3. What do you think William Raspberry means when he says
a critical ingredient in restoring the black family is to "save the boys"?
Do you agree or disagree?

On Family Night in one of our evangelistic crusades in New
England, I gave a message on how to establish a happy marriage and home.
For my text I read Joshua 24:15:

But if serving the Lord seems undesirable to you, then choose for
yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your forefathers
served beyond the River, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you are
living. But as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord. (Emphasis
added.)

I challenged the audience to make Christ the head
of their homes, to evaluate what was happening in their marriages 
with their children, how they were handling money,

Page 64

and the priorities in their lives  by the guiding principles
of Scripture. Were husband and wife having difficulties? Were the kids
disrespectful and unmanageable? Did they feel like giving up? I emphasized
that it wasn't too late to get down on their knees and give their lives and
families to God. It wasn't too late to rebuild their homes on Christ, the
only solid foundation that can withstand the pressures and temptations coming
at the family from every side.

Then I gave the invitation. Many came forward. Later
in the counseling room, a counselor brought a couple to me and said, "I think
you might like to talk with these folks, Dr. Jones."

The man had tears streaming down his face. But he
told this story:

My wife and I have been separated for many years. Our home life
was so bad that the city came and took away our children, who are now living
in foster homes. We saw no hope for our marriage, so we have recently filed
for divorce. But the other day a friend of mine invited me to your crusade.
I was feeling so hopeless I thought, "Why not?" Unknown to me, another mutual
friend invited my wife.

When you preached on marriage tonight, something happened, and
I believe it's the work of God. I came forward and prayed to receive Christ
as my Savior. I'd made such a mess of my life, I wanted to give my life to
God and let Him take over. Then, I saw my wife in the counseling room! I
didn't even know she was here tonight! But she also came forward to give
her life to Christ.

I noticed that the wife too was crying. They were
holding hands.

The husband looked at his wife and said, "Now that
we've both given ourselves to Christ, we want to give up our plans for
divorce

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and start our marriage over again  this time with Christ
at the center."

What a time of joy we had! We all prayed and hugged
and cried together. As they left that auditorium, the man said, "Dr. Jones,
we're going to pray that God will give us our children back, so that we can
have a complete home with Christ at the head."

Our international "Hour of Freedom" broadcast, aired
on a weekly basis, helps and encourages people. One Christian wife wrote,
"I've prayed much for my unsaved husband, an alcoholic. While listening to
your radio sermon, he received Jesus Christ as Savior. He's a new man, and
we're happy as a family."

Beyond the troubling statistics in the last two chapters
are the very human stories like these two couples who stood on the brink
of disaster, except for the grace of God. The state of the family is eroding
at such an alarming rate that the media has been sitting up and taking notice.
A series on the "state of the black family" was aired on the black entertainment
network in our area on a daily TV program called Our Voices. On one
of these programs, host Bev Smith asked, "What can we do to restore the black
family?"

This is the question we would like to
address.

Rebuild the Spiritual Foundation

Many families are in trouble because the foundation is weak. If
we want to restore the family we must begin by laying a strong spiritual
foundation. The Word of God says, "Unless the Lord builds the house, its
builders labor in vain" (Psalm 127:1).

Jesus told a parable (Matthew 7:24-27) about a man
who dug deep and built his house upon solid rock. When the storms came it
stood because it had a solid foundation. Another man built his house on sand.
It may have been a beautiful house; but when it was buffeted by storms,
it

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simply collapsed  no strong foundation. Jesus said this is
what happens when someone hears His words but doesn't put them into
practice.

You cannot build a good family on materialism or pleasure.
You cannot build a good family on alcohol and drug abuse. You cannot sneer
at values like integrity, honesty, hard work, respect for parents, and love
of neighbor and hope to build a good family. You cannot provide what your
children really need if you fail to build on a foundation that holds in the
hard times as well as the sunny days.

The Bible has a lot to say about this foundation.
First of all, a firm foundation for the family is one where Jesus Christ
is welcomed as Savior and Lord. This is an individual decision, just
as it was for the husband and wife who came to the crusade on the brink of
divorce. When they left that meeting, their troubles weren't over; they had
some struggles to face. But they had planted their feet on the solid Rock,
a saving relationship with Jesus. They had taken the first step in a new
direction.

But what happens if you are a believer and your spouse
is not? God can work through you to create a Christian home and win your
spouse through prayer and your respectful and loving behavior. But if you
are a young person, or a single parent or adult, we strongly caution against
marrying un unbeliever. The Bible instructs:

Do not be yoked together with unbelievers. For what do righteousness
and wickedness have in common? Or what fellowship can light have with darkness?
What harmony is there between Christ and Belial? What does a believer have
in common with an unbeliever? (2 Corinthians 6:14-15).

After our oldest daughter, Cheryl, married Norman
Sanders, a staff member at the Billy Graham Training Center in Asheville,
North Carolina, one of our other daughters, Gail, an airline flight attendant,
came home for a visit.

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I could tell she was quite upset about something. I said, "Gail,
what's the trouble?"

She sighed. "Dad I want to level with you. There's
a very fine young man who is a flight attendant. We've had a few dates, and
he's a gentleman in every way. He's really going places with the airlines.
You know, Cheryl was blessed to get married so soon to Norman, who is a
Christian." Then Gail went on to say that she and her sister, Phyllis, also
a flight attendant, hadn't found anyone. She fidgeted a little and I waited.
"What I'm coming to is, the other girls on the airlines say, 'Gail, you better
nail this guy; you don't find fellows like him anymore.' Now, Dad, do you
think it would work? He goes to church."

I said, "Gail, is he saved? Does he know the Lord?
You know what we believe."

She said, "No."

As gently as I could I told her she had two choices.
"You could marry him, but if you marry him, you know God's Word says not
to be 'yoked together' with unbelievers. This isn't because he's 'bad,' but
you would be pulling in different directions. Or you could say no and tell
the Lord you're willing to wait for the man He has in mind for
you."

She looked at me and smiled. "Dad, I thought you'd
say that. I just needed reassurance." So we sat there at the table and held
hands and prayed that God in His time and according to His will and Word
would bring the right husbands to her and Phyllis. And in time God answered
prayer and two fine Christian professional baseball players with the Cleveland
Indians came along. Gail married
Andre Thornton,
who is now the president of Christian Family Outreach, Inc., in Cleveland.
Months later Phyllis married
PatKelly,
now an evangelist with Lifeline Ministries in Baltimore.

Second, a firm foundation for the family is one
where Jesus Christ is worshiped as Lord. By this we mean a home where
the Word of God is read and the family prays together regularly. A family's
spiritual life shouldn't be limited to going to church on Sunday. The Lord
gives some amazing instructions about family life in this regard:

Be careful, or you will be enticed to turn away and worship other
gods ... Fix these words of Mine in your hearts and minds, tie them as symbols
on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Teach them to your children,
talking about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road,
when you lie down and when you get up. Write them on the doorframes of your
houses and on your gates, so that your days and the days of your children
may be many (Deuteronomy 11:16, 18-21).

In other words, God Word should be woven into all
areas of family life. This means reading it with your spouse, reading it
with your children, and talking about what God says.

Wanda and I have prayer and Bible reading each day
and evening. This is aside from time spent separately before the Lord. When
I am away in meetings, I frequently call her and we close our conversations
in prayer. When our children were home, we also had family devotions together,
letting them take turns reading and discussing the Bible, followed by a time
of prayer.

This doesn't mean forcing your preschoolers to sit
through the "begats" in the Old Testament. You can begin with a Bible story
at bedtime; then as your children get older, read some of the exciting stories
right from the Bible. As they move into their teen years, read a short passage
 five to ten verses  and discuss it together.

Now that our children have left the nest, Wanda and
I welcome their visits and the occasions to visit them. We enjoy having fun
times and also family devotions together in their homes. Occasionally, they
will phone and share prayer requests with us and we with them.

Unfortunately, a lot of families have let prayer and
Bible reading

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as a family slip by the wayside. There is a story about a pastor
who became concerned about a family who had stopped coming to church. So
he called to arrange a visit. When he arrived, the family was all dressed
up and graciously invited him in. The father said, "Pastor, we're sorry that
we haven't been out to church; we just haven't been able to make it. But
we want you to know that we've been thinking about you and the members of
the church." The father then turned to his young boy, "Son, our pastor is
here and I want you to go and bring us the book we so dearly love as a family."
The little boy scampered off and returned shortly with the Sears-Roebuck
catalog!

It's become a cliché, but there's real truth
in the saying, "The family that prays together, stays together." First of
all, prayer acknowledges that we can't build a family alone; we need God's
help. We turn to Him day in and day out to ask His guidance for the challenges
of family life. And He has promised to help us. Secondly, it's hard to fight
and be angry at each other while you're praying together.

When we celebrated our fortieth wedding anniversary
several years ago, our children planned a big celebration. They told lots
of stories and family secrets on us  stories like the time Wanda ate
a whole plate of Christmas cookies that Lisa had carefully decorated, and
the not-so-expert haircuts I used to give David in Liberia! But we were moved
when one after another of our children shared memories like these: "I'll
always remember coming home from school and seeing Dad on his knees praying
for us." "Sometimes there would be all-night prayer meetings in our church."
"One of my earliest memories is walking into Mom and Dad's room early in
the morning and hearing them praying for us." "Now that I'm out on my own,
I gain strength from knowing my parents are home praying for
me."1

Is there friction, tension in the home? Get together
and pray.

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Ask God to help you love and forgive one another and to show you
another way. Pray with your children about the tough times they're experiencing
at school or with their friends. Pray with your spouse about how to relate
to each other in love. Pray for your friends, your church, your work, your
nation. Your family will benefit, and your children will
remember.

Third, a firm foundation is one where Jesus Christ
is the head of the family. In other words, the family not only reads
God's Word, but applies it to their lives. Jesus sets the standards
for the home. A Christian family doesn't try to "keep up with the Joneses"
(we've always disliked that phrase  for obvious reasons!). A Christian
family doesn't let current fads and attitudes dictate their decisions, but
lets God set their priorities.

I recall an experience in our home in Cleveland when
one day my dad sat Clarence and me down and said, "There are certain kids
who come in this community that I don't want to see you with. They have a
bad reputation." I found out later he was right. My parents were very cautious
about our friends. They knew that the wrong associations can pull you down,
make you compromise your standards, and get you into trouble.

Some parents today seemingly don't care what their
kids do; many others care but act helpless to guide their children in the
right path. If parents are going to successfully teach and apply godly principles
in their home, these principles must be taught in love. We can be firm and
loving at the same time. Children may often rebel when limits are set on
their behavior, but we must be prepared for this and respond in love without
letting down our standards. And also children must see these principles at
work in their parents' lives. You can't tell your daughter to be honest if
she sees you telling "little white lies" or being dishonest. You can't tell
your son to be pure and chaste if he knows that Dad is not loyal and faithful
to Mother. We parents must "walk our talk."

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Fourth, a firm foundation for the family results
when husband and wife fulfill their God-given responsibilities to each other
according to the Word of God. That is, the husband is truly the kind
of husband and father God intends him to be; the wife is the kind of wife
and mother that God intends her to be. This is an area of great confusion
today. Men don't know what is expected of them; women are pulled in conflicting
directions between homes and careers. There is a great deal of hostility
and disrespect between men and women. Both men and women are walking out
on family responsibilities to find "personal fulfillment"  or simply
because they can't cope.

More about this in the next chapter, but at this point
it is enough to say how important it is to build our relationships as husbands
and wives on the foundation of God's Word. Not what we think the Bible
says; not lifting one phrase here or there out of context. But we must study
it and see what God has to say. After all, creating man and woman for each
other was God's idea in the first place. They were both made in the
image of God and "it was very good." God's principles, lived with love and
grace, are good for both husband and wife.

We say "rebuild the spiritual foundation" of
the family because it was the Word of God which helped many blacks survive
the devastating years of slavery. Our ancestors had a shared faith which
held them together. The Gospel gave them hope when all looked hopeless; their
faith in Jesus Christ the Savior and the love of God kept them "free" in
their spirits when their bodies and lives were shackled. Out of the heartache,
trials, and persecutions grew the "Negro spirituals"  a rich heritage
of music that was a source of their strength in the Lord during those troubled
times. Unfortunately, many educated black Americans think it is beneath them
to sing those songs today, that they portray a stereotype of another time
and place. They don't realize that the spirituals reveal the dynamic Christian
faith of our ancestors and present a challenge to us

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today. I'm delighted that many black churches and college choirs
include them in their musical repertoire.

One night Wanda and I enjoyed a special television
program called "Spirituals in Concert," recorded in Carnegie Hall to honor
the world renowned black opera singer, Marion Anderson. Jessy Norman and
Kathleen Battle were the soloists, accompanied by the chorus and orchestra,
with James Leving, director. What a moving spiritual experience that was
for us! Great Negro spirituals such as "There Is a Balm in Gilead" and "He's
Got the Whole World in His Hands" came alive with new meaning.

That evening we recalled other outstanding black
American singing groups such as the Fisk Jubilee Singers, the Cleveland Colored
Quintet, the Tuskegee Choir, and the famous Wings Over Jordan Choir heard
years ago coast to coast on Sundays over CBS radio. Millions of listeners
enjoyed the Wings Over Jordan Choir's unique rendition of the spirituals.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt invited the choir to sing at the White House.
The singers also traveled abroad and disbanded in the '50s Some time ago
former members and friends began a fund which gives college scholarships
annually to students with musical talents.

Some African Americans are also saying that Christianity
is a white man's religion, that it must be rejected by the black community.
"After all," they say, "the Bible was used to justify slavery by the
slaveholders." It is true that God's Word has been twisted and misused by
many people all through the centuries to justify their own sinfulness; people
are still doing it today. But the Bible says, "There is neither Jew nor Greek,
slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus" (Galatians
3:28). When Jesus Christ came, He broke the boundaries of nationality and
race to proclaim His love for the whole world. "For God so loved the
world, that He gave His one and only Son, that whoever believes in Him shall
not perish but have eternal life" (John 3:16).

Christ is the hope for the whole world. Christ is
the hope for the black family, and all other families.

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We must rebuild the family on a spiritual foundation, with Christ
as the chief cornerstone.

What else must we do to rebuild the foundation of
the black family?

Restore the Sanctity of Marriage

In a newspaper article "Why Are Men Going to the 'Lite' Relationship?"
the author says, "It isn't clear that the sexual revolution did women any
great favor. Traditionally, women have traded sexual intimacy for commitment.
The greatest intimacy was intercourse and the greatest commitment was marriage.
Ideally, they took place on the same day. But all that has
changed."2

Our young people are getting very mixed messages today.
In the movies and on TV there is very little support for reserving sexual
intimacy for marriage. Sexual "freedom" has created an attitude among young
men, especially, of: "Why marry? I can have sex without all the
responsibilities." The sexual relationship of a man and a woman is a natural,
wonderful thing when experienced as part of a holistic relationship: love,
commitment, faithfulness, responsibility for children. But now that sex apart
from marriage has been accepted by society, marriage itself has become suspect.
Kids are growing up with a distorted view, because they aren't convinced
that marriage works anyway. "Why bother," they say. "If we break up, we won't
have to go through a divorce."

Another distortion is that homosexuality is simply
an "alternative lifestyle." I heard about a conference on homosexuality held
in one of the historic churches in America. The speaker, a practicing homosexual
who claimed to be a Christian, argued that the Bible speaks only to the issue
of "lust" or promiscuous relationships, not to homosexual activity per se.
But this view is creating a lot of confusion among young people. While Christians
need to

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have compassion toward those who struggle with homosexuality, we
must not condone something expressly forbidden by
Scripture.3

A lot of people are concerned about the growing
numbers of teen pregnancies, teen parents, sexually transmitted diseases
(STDs) , and especially HIV / AIDS, among all segments of our society 
black and white, rich and poor. But in many cases the only solutions offered
by schools and youth organizations are contraceptive education and availability,
and accessibility of abortion  "and your parents don't have to know."
Somehow society is turning a blind eye to the source of the problems: removing
sexual experience from the place God intended it as His good gift: the marriage
relationship between a man and a woman. Our Lord also uses this fact to
illustrate the relationship He has with His church (Ephesians
5:23-25).

We will never address these problems among our young
people, never stem the long-term impact on families, as growing legions of
children grow up with only one parent or experience the devastation of divorce,
unless we restore the divine pattern established by God:

The Lord God said, "It is not good for the man to be alone. I will
make a helper suitable for him ... For this reason a man will leave his father
and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh" (Genesis
2:18, 24).

"Getting married" in and of itself doesn't address
the issue. True marriage means commitment. When a couple takes their marriage
vows, they are making a pledge before God. The longer Wanda and I are married,
the more we realize how important that word commitment is. No, it's not always
easy. Sickness and hard times can put a strain on a family. Learning to
communicate with one's spouse in love takes work; there are misunderstandings.
We need to learn to forgive each other, tell each other we're sorry and ask
forgiveness. This is

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why having God at the center of our relationship is so important:
we turn to Him for grace; His Word teaches the importance of forgiveness,
and what it means to love.

In his helpful book called Hedges  Loving
Your Marriage Enough to Protect It,4 Jerry Jenkins speaks
primarily to men about the sanctity of marriage and the importance of setting
"hedges" around their behavior toward other women once they have made a
commitment to one woman. His suggestions are practical: Don't flirt, even
in jest; if you are a pastor or professional and counsel the opposite sex,
have a third person present; keep compliments to female co-workers impersonal
("That's a nice dress," not "You look gorgeous today!"). If we believe
that marriage is a sacred commitment, it affects the way we behave, the decisions
we make, and what our priorities are.

As one fifteen-year-old said to her parents recently,
"You don't know how much it means to me to know that you wouldn't even
consider divorcing each other. I go to sleep at night secure because
my family is always going to be there for me." Now that's commitment; that
young teen has a model of what a marriage relationship can be that will be
a spiritual foundation for her own future.

Many young people are scared of marriage; they don't
see models of committed marriages. Most of their friends' parents are divorced,
or are on their second or third marriages, or maybe these kids never knew
their fathers at all. If all they know is what they can see around them today,
they won't know what marriage can be.

That's why we as adults in the black community must
recommit ourselves to the sanctity of marriage; we must not allow divorce
to be an easy way out when we have problems. We must once again teach (and
model) that sex should be reserved for the marriage relationship, when two
people are ready to commit themselves to each other and take responsibility
for establishing a new family unit. We must help our children understand
that God ordained marriage to protect and provide for the family, so
that

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every member has the love and support to become all that God meant
for them to be.

This is a monumental task. But with God all things
are possible. We can begin where we are  with ourselves, with our own
families, in our own churches. But it will mean each family member 
husband, wife, extended family  discovering and reclaiming the role
that God has for them in the family.

The next chapter continues discussion of rebuilding
some of the most important foundational elements for a strong
family.

Some things to think about and do:

1. Have you asked Jesus to be Lord and Savior of your life?
If not, talk with your pastor or a Christian friend about what this
means.

2. If you are married, do you and your spouse regularly
read the Bible and pray together with your children? If not, try it for a
week; see what happens. Some suggestions for reading: The Gospel of Matthew,
the Gospel of John, Romans, Ephesians, 1 John (all in the New
Testament).

3. What is your commitment to the sanctity of marriage (i.e.,
reserving sexual intimacy for your spouse)? If you have broken this commitment,
ask God to help you ask forgiveness of those you have wronged, and enable
you to live a clean and holy life before your family.

Lord, I want to be more loving in my heart, in my
heart.Lord, I want to be more loving in my heart, in my
heart.

As mentioned earlier, there is a lot of confusion today
about the roles of men and women, especially in marriage. A lot of men are
failing because they're listening to the wrong signals, they don't really
know what their role is in the family.

The Role of the Husband

An early slogan in the women's movement touted, "A woman without
a man is like a fish without a bicycle." That is, women don't have to depend
on men; they're capable themselves. But how does a man hear that message?
"Women don't need me; I can do what I want." Too many men have just abdicated
their responsibility. They father children to prove their manhood but leave
the raising to women.

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Some are lazy, refusing to work. Some men  angry over the
hostility they have experienced  are abusive; this is a very serious
problem. Yet the kids are listening to rap groups like Two Live Crew, whose
raps advocate violent sex and demean women in the grossest way.

The diminished role of the husband and father in the
home is the result of many complex factors, as we explored in chapters 3
and 4. Some men, undereducated and underemployed, feel discouraged; welfare
can provide for their families better than they can, so they split. Alcohol,
drugs, crime, and the high percentage of blacks in prison are also robbing
our homes of the men we so desperately need to help build a new foundation.
This is the particular concern of the Nehemiah Family Project in Washington,
D.C.

Many years ago I preached a series of revival messages
at the Havenscourt Colonial Church in Oakland, California. Unknown to me
there was a twelve-year-old boy named Don Lewis who came each night and heard
my messages about putting God at the center of our lives and our homes. Today
Don Lewis has a burden for the black family. He developed the Nehemiah Family
Project to help "rebuild the wall" around the family, much as Nehemiah rebuilt
the wall around the ancient city of Jerusalem when it lay in ruins. Don feels
the key to rebuilding the family is giving black men a vision for their role
of leadership and responsibility to their wives and children. Many have never
had a male role model for this task and need retraining from the Word of
God.

Tony Evans, pastor of the Oak Cliff Bible Fellowship
Church in Dallas, also challenges men regarding their role in the family:
"Take back the leadership role," he says.1 Men shouldn't ask their
wives, "May I pretty please be the leader in the home?" Rather, husbands
and fathers should begin fulfilling the responsibilities that God has given
them and being the head of their homes. This may mean

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asking your wife (or the mother of your children) for forgiveness
for leaving the burden of raising the children on her shoulders, for failing
to provide leadership for the home. It may mean asking your children for
forgiveness for not being there for them when they needed you. Someone has
said, "Your children need your presence, not your presents." More often than
not, wives will welcome husbands willing to take loving leadership for the
welfare of the family.

To understand the proper relationship between husbands
and wives, we need to study Christ's relationship to the church. Here is
some food for thought: "If anyone does not provide for his relatives, and
especially for his immediate family, he has denied the faith and is worse
than an unbeliever" (1 Timothy 5:8).

This is a primary challenge to husbands today: it
is your responsibility to provide and care for your family. This does not
mean that a wife should never work outside the home. In our economy, it may
take two incomes to support the family. Or once the children are raised,
a woman may have many years to devote to a career or area of service. But
it does mean that the burden of providing for the family should not be on
the shoulders of the wife and mother. A husband does great harm to his family
if he abandons this essential role or if he squanders the family resources
on alcohol, drugs, or gambling, or plunges the family into debt to purchase
status symbols such as fancy cars and expensive clothes.

On the other side of this issue, husbands should not
feel they have fulfilled their family responsibilities just because they
bring home a paycheck. Let's look at what else the Scriptures have to say:
"Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave Himself
up for her ... In this way husbands ought to love their wives as their own
bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself" (Ephesians 5:25,
28).

Too many husbands have pounced on verse 23, "For the
husband is the head of the wife," and neglect to read

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any further. But Paul was addressing wives at that point! (We'll
come back to that.) The emphasis for husbands is sacrificial love,
just as Christ loved the church so much that He gave up His own life for
her. Unfortunately, some men twist being "head of the family" to mean being
lord and master and ruling with an iron hand ("What I say goes!")

What a revolution would happen in our marriages if
husbands shed this worldly concept of leadership and instead clothed themselves
with Christ's example of servant leadership! In preaching on this
concept, Tony Evans set up this scenario for husbands: "Husband, come home
from work, greet your wife and say, 'Honey, I've come home to serve you!'
"2

What does that mean? That husbands should do the dishes,
bathe the kids, scrub the kitchen floor? Well, it may mean doing some of
those things! But what it primarily means is seeing to it that your wife
is not overburdened with her responsibilities, doing whatever would be an
encouragement to her, considering her needs and desires in what needs to
be done and decisions that are made.

Right attitudes should translate into appropriate
actions and relationships. Different couples may work out tasks and
responsibilities in different ways, but the attitude of the husband should
be one of sacrificial self-giving. We feel that any man who does this and
takes his role seriously before God, will be respected by his wife,
and she will love and honor him in return. First Peter 3:7 admonishes, "Husbands,
... be considerate as you live with your wives, and treat them with respect
as the weaker partner and as heirs with you of the gracious gift of life,
so that nothing will hinder your prayers."

Note that "weaker" does not mean inferior."
After all, both man and woman, created in the image of God, are heirs of
the gift of salvation! Peter is simply saying that men, who are generally
stronger than women physically, should not take advantage of their wives.
Instead, they should

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take even greater care to respect their wives as partners in life
together. And, he adds, this tender care for one's wife is necessary to a
healthy prayer life.

It is important that husbands encourage and affirm
their wives. It's amazing how many men take their wives for granted. We heard
of a husband who was thinking about his wife one day on the job. "I've got
a good wife," he thought. "She's faithful, she's kind, she's a good mother."
So he decided to do something nice for her and on the way home purchased
some flowers. When he came home, he handed her the bouquet with a big kiss.
To his astonishment, she burst into tears.

"Oh, John," she wailed, "it's been a terrible day.
The kids have been fighting, I burned the supper  and now you come
home drunk!" Poor John; he gave too little too late.

In the midst of the family crisis today, we praise
God for the husbands who do provide for their families and are faithful to
their wives, who do lead their families spiritually and give themselves to
their children. Let us pray that the influence of these godly men will spread
to our young people and others who so desperately need to recapture the vision
of what a Christian husband is.

Renew the Role of the Wife

Just as we need to renew the vision and high calling of being a
husband, we need to renew the vision and high calling of being a
wife.

The glorious tribute to a wife in Proverbs 31 is still
the best description of a godly woman. Not only was this woman skillful and
accomplished, but "her husband has full confidence in her ... She brings
him good, not harm, all the days of her life" (vv. 11-12). This is a
great gift to a man, to have a wife who is supportive of his efforts and
endeavors, who builds him up and encourages him when he is discouraged, who
teaches their children to love and respect him.

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All too often women are in competition with men today,
especially with two incomes. It's "my money" when it should be "our
money." Or arguments center around "my rights" rather than seeking the good
of the other. These are popular attitudes the Christian woman must resist
if she wants to help strengthen and establish her home.

Proverbs 31:20  "She opens her arms to the
poor and extends her hands to the needy." The ministry of caring and
compassion is one of the great gifts of womanhood. Wives must be careful
that career ambitions or even a narrow focus on one's own family do not inhibit
the gift of hospitality and caring for the needs of others. This is traditionally
one of the strengths of the black community, one we must continue to
nurture.

Proverbs 31:25  "She is clothed with strength
and dignity." This is a good description of the black wife and mother
throughout our heritage. She has persevered in distressing circumstances,
through slavery, segregation, and poverty. Even today, when so many
African-American men are unable to get jobs, if it weren't for some of these
strong wives and single mothers there wouldn't be a family.

Proverbs 31:26  "She speaks with wisdom,
and faithful instruction is on her tongue." In growing up in Oberlin,
Wanda remembers that her mother always spoke wisely, and her teaching has
helped Wanda make important choices about what attitudes she was going to
have when confronted with life's challenges.

Proverbs 31:30  "Charm is deceptive, and
beauty is fleeting; but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised." The
influence of godly women on the African-American family is immeasurable.
But it's not easy to make loving God a priority. Women are inundated with
advertising for perfume, clothes, makeup  all with the message that
these "make the woman." Of course, men like their wives to be attractive,
to take pride in their appearance, and a woman should not neglect

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these things. But they need to be kept in the right perspective.
True beauty is a loving and godly spirit.

A woman who fears the Lord needs to consider the
scriptural principles about the relation of wives to husbands. These are
not popular topics today in an atmosphere of "women's rights." But we need
to consider their meaning: "Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.
Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head
of the wife as Christ is the head of the church" (Ephesians
5:21-23).

This teaching grows out of the general admonition
for Christians (including both husbands and wives) to submitto
one another out of reverence for Christ. If we make Christ the center
of our homes, if husbands are called to give themselves sacrificially to
their wives in the same way that Christ loves the church, then wives are
called to support and respect this leadership with their wholehearted
participation.

But let's be clear: This kind of submission
doesn't mean being a doormat, or never expressing an opinion, or not
taking responsibility for decisions about the family. It does mean
enabling your husband to fulfill his role through encouragement, respect,
support, and godly wisdom. It is truly an equal partnership, even though
the roles are somewhat different. The Apostle Paul admits that these things
are "a profound mystery" (Ephesians 5:32), but they reflect the relation
of Christ and the church.

Some women say, "Sure, I'd be glad to respect a godly
husband who had the welfare of his wife and family as his first priority.
But you should see the lout I'm married to!" This is actually a serious question.
What does the wife do whose husband is not a Christian, or who doesn't provide
for his family properly, or who drinks or is verbally abusive? First let's
look at what Scripture says:

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If you suffer for doing good and you endure it, this is commendable
before God ... Wives, in the same way be submissive to your husbands so that,
if any of them do not believe the word, they may be won over without words
by the behavior of their wives, when they see the purity and reverence of
your lives. Your beauty should not come from outward adornment .... Instead,
it should be that of your inner self, the unfading beauty of a gentle and
quiet spirit, which is of great worth in God's sight (1 Peter 2:20;
3:1-4).

We must realize first of all that this is a very difficult
situation. As a Christian woman, a wife would really have to seek the Lord
concerning what her approach to her husband should be. She should read the
Scripture and pray, asking God what to do. God promises, "Trust the Lord
with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways
acknowledge Him and He will make your paths straight [direct your path]"
(Proverbs 3:5-6). Depending on the circumstances, she might also request
support and counsel from her pastor or a Christian counselor. (Obviously,
if her husband is physically abusive, she must get help and protection, even
if it means leaving him.)

If a wife will pray for her husband and approach him
in this way, it is possible for him to turn around. Sometimes it doesn't
come all at once, but with God, all things are possible. There isn't any
situation too hard for God to redeem if we are faithful.

Restore the Role of the Extended Family

The extended family has traditionally been an important strength
of the black family. In years past there were no rest homes, and there was
usually an elderly aunt or grandparent in the home, helping to care for the
children and passing on years of experience and wisdom. Even if there was
an "old folks home" in which to put the older members, most people said,
"No, they belong to us; we're going to keep them as long as we can." This
is a carry over

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from our African heritage, where there was a family loyalty that
reverences older people, gives them a place of respect, and that includes
aunts and uncles and other older family members.

When we lived in Liberia, a man named Robert used
to do some work for us. I noticed that his shoes were just about worn out.
I had an extra pair I thought might fit, so I gave them to him. Robert was
very pleased and showed the shoes around to everyone he met. For two Sundays
he showed up at church wearing his new shoes, but the third Sunday he was
wearing his old worn-out pair.

"Robert," I said, "where are you new
shoes?"

"Oh, Pastor Jones," he said, "my older brother came
to visit from the country. He wanted to know where I got my shoes, so I told
him. He said he wanted the shoes and that I should give them to him because
he is the older brother. So I did."

I felt a little irked. "You mean you gave him the
shoes that I gave to you?"

"Pastor, that's our custom. If there's a need in the
family, they have a right to take what we have because we respect any family
member who is older."

That custom may not always be fair, but the attitude
is a far cry from the fate of many elderly people today. We have visited
many older folks in rest homes and hospitals who never have a visit from
their families. It is like they have been discarded. The trend among many
young people today is to feel they no longer need the older generation; they
know everything and can't be told anything by parents and grandparents who
are too "old fashioned." The extended family network is
weakening.

In our concern to restore the black family, we also
want to strengthen and restore the role of the extended family. Again, let's
see what Scripture has to say:

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[Jesus] said to them, "You have a fine way of setting aside the
commands of God in order to observe your own traditions! For Moses said,
'Honor your father and your mother,' and 'Anyone who curses his father or
mother must be put to death.' But you say that if a man says to his father
or mother: 'Whatever help you might otherwise have received from me is Corban'
(that is, a gift devoted to God), then you no longer let him do anything
for his father or mother. Thus you nullify the word of God by your tradition"
(Mark 7:9-13).

In other words, Jesus really scolded the religious
leaders for telling people they could give money to the church and then tell
their elderly parents: "Sorry, there's nothing left for you. I just gave
it all to the temple." The message is clear: we have a responsibility to
see that our older family members are cared for.

Admittedly, this is often challenging and can be very
disruptive. After we returned from Africa, we settled in New York, from where
I continued to travel to various countries and around the states conducting
evangelistic crusades and other meetings as part of the Billy Graham Team.
On my way home from a California crusade, I stopped in Oberlin to see my
parents. I was shocked to find my father had leukemia! My mother was in failing
health because of the stress of caring for him  which she had cheerfully
tried to keep from us in her letters. When I returned home to New York, I
told Wanda how troubled I was about my parents and wondered what we should
do. I could hardly ask my wife and children to move again, but that is what
I was feeling inside.

I discussed the matter with her and we prayed. Wanda
decided to go to Oberlin to assess the situation herself. I remained in New
York to conduct an evangelistic crusade at the Apollo Theater. The Jones
Sisters Trio sang, as did other musical groups.

When Wanda returned, her mind was made up: "There's
only one thing to do; we need to move back to Oberlin to

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care for Mom and Dad Jones. You're the only surviving son; this
is our responsibility." So we moved once again, into my parents' home, where
we cared for my father and mother.

It wasn't always easy, especially with my mother,
a very independent woman who didn't want things changed from the way she
was used to. But I will always appreciate Wanda's attitude when she said,
"This is our family and our responsibility." God blessed the
decision. Our children were able to have a special relationship with their
grandparents they might otherwise have missed.

Wanda has often said that she regrets that both her
parents died before any of our children were born. She would have liked them
to know the other side of their roots.

Among some families in the black community, the importance
of the extended family is being revived. People are taking an interest in
having family reunions, bringing several different generations together to
pass on the stories and learn from one another. For instance, the nineteen
children (and their children and grandchildren) of Reverend Z. and Mrs. Mattie
Broadous have been having a family reunion every three years since 1941!
They have published four editions of a souvenir book with photos and short
biographies of each branch of the family tree. The introduction to the 1985
edition reads in part:

We (sisters and brothers) have lived to see many changes in our
society and the world in general .... In the midst of all of these changes,
God has continued to bless and to bring us together, where we can share our
experiences, rejoice over our achievements, and encourage each other in our
failures ... [We] thank God for our family. [We] praise Him for our sainted
father and mother and for the principles they instilled in us ... Our parents
were not wealthy so they left no worldly goods to be divided among us, but
they left us an abundance of "loving, caring, and sharing" within us. We
take pride in that heritage.3

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The extended family can shore up a weak link in the
family. If there is no father in the home, a grandfather or uncle can take
a special interest in the children, provide a caring male presence in a child's
life, participate in family activities, and provide a role model that may
otherwise be lacking. Sometimes this happens naturally; other times it may
need an intentional decision based on a vision for family, and what we can
do to bind up the wounded among us.

Some things to think about and do:

1. If you are married, read the Scriptures that have been
mentioned in this chapter and discuss them together. Which biblical principles
would help strengthen your marriage? Which biblical principles feel threatening?
Why?

2. If you have an unbelieving spouse, study 1 Peter 3:1-7.
Are you praying for your spouse? Are there things that need to change in
your attitude or behavior to be a loving witness toward your spouse? Do you
have a pastor or counselor you can talk to about the situation and receive
support?

3. If you are unmarried or a single parent, how do you feel
these principles for rebuilding the foundation of the family apply to you?
What can single parents do to receive support for rebuilding the family in
the absence of a spouse?

4. Whether married or unmarried, make a commitment to begin
reading God's Word daily, and set aside time for personal and/or family prayer.
Try it for two weeks. What has been the effect on you? On your
family?

I shall not, I shall not be moved.I shall not, I shall not be moved.Just like a tree that's planted by the waterI shall not be moved.

Several years ago a TV special called "Ethics and Business"
took the viewer into a classroom of high schoolers interested in going into
business. A hypothetical question was posed to the students: "You're in business
making a certain product. Your own research tells you that continuing to
produce this product would cause toxic materials to seep into the water supply
and in five to seven years would affect the health of the surrounding community
 but would also make you a great deal of money. And there's
almost no chance that you would be caught. Would you go ahead with it?" The
majority of students said yes, they would, if there was only a minimal chance
of getting caught! And these are future business leaders.

How have we come so far from the basic moral values
of honesty, integrity, and the welfare of others? The breakdown

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in values is infecting not only business ethics, but personal and
social ethics as well ... with obvious consequences for the family. Yet it
is in the family that these values must first be taught.

Some black leaders are saying the family can be restored
and maintained only if social conditions improve, if blacks have better jobs,
if we get out and vote so we can change political policy, etc. Yes, these
are important issues; however, we are concerned when even ministers say nothing
about the root problem, which is a spiritual one. The cover of the December
17, 1990 issue of Newsweek proclaimed, "Young Americans Return to
God." Yet the accompanying article was disturbing. It seems that many young
Americans are returning to church, but on their own terms: "Singles still
consider their private lives off limits .... They have a keen eye for the
sins of society, 'but as for individual sin ... it's kind of lost.'
"1

Wanda has often said to our children something her
mother used to say: "You take yourself wherever you go." What we bring to
the political process, how we deal with social problems and economic issues,
will be no better than the values we uphold in our personal
lives.

Part of rebuilding the foundation for the family is
instilling strong moral and spiritual values in our children, so they'll
know later how to cope with temptations. Many are becoming teenage alcoholics
and falling into the trap of crack and cocaine; young men are getting girls
pregnant; they are turning to crime, because they're coming from homes with
little support and weak values.

Some parents and schools think a "value-neutral"
environment should be cultivated, so that children can choose their own values.
This is folly; if we fail to teach what is right, we will then teach that
anything goes. This leads to social chaos. Wise King Solomon said, "All a
man's ways seem right to him, but the Lord weighs the heart. To do what is
right and just is more acceptable than sacrifice" (Proverbs
21:2-3).

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We believe it's important to teach moral values based
on an objective standard: the Word of God. As families read the Bible together,
they will discover many principles that, if applied, will strengthen the
family relationship and how the family relates to society around
them.

The Ten Commandments, for instance, is a biblical
summary of God's principles for the family and society. Let's take a look
at these moral and spiritual values and how applying them will strengthen
our families.

1. "I am the Lord your God ... You shall have no
other gods before Me" (Exodus 20:2-3). God wants to be at the center
of our families. So often we put other priorities first: climbing the career
ladder, pleasure and good times, gaining material wealth and status, even
clothes and looking good. We have made gods out of money, ambition, status
 or even alcohol, parties, and "getting high." Unfortunately, this
is often at the expense of the family. So many families are pulling in different
directions or letting other priorities pull them apart. If we take this
commandment seriously, we will make our relationship to God first priority,
not just for ourselves, but for our family life.

When Wanda told me, "Yes, I love you, but I need to
put Christ first in my life," I didn't understand. But when I put Christ
first in my own life, I understood. Christ then gave us a direction for our
life together. We had a reason outside of ourselves to exist. By making Him
Lord of our family, we had Someone to turn to when we didn't agree; we could
pray together when we didn't know what to do. The Bible says, "In all your
ways acknowledge Him, and He will make your paths straight" (Proverbs
3:5-6).

Putting God at the center of the family gives a focus
around which all other life directions can be oriented. And any family that
has this focus is going to have an extra strength they wouldn't have
otherwise.

Without Jesus Christ at the center, we can't follow
the other commandments in our own strength; we will be overwhelmed by all
the pressures crushing the family.

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2. You shall not make for yourself an idol in the
form of anything ... You shall not bow down to them or worship them" (Exodus
20:4). Many people tend to skip over this commandment; they think it
refers to pagan images made of wood and stone. It does, but God is also referring
to anything that we "worship," that has first place in our lives.

There's a story in the Bible (Matthew 19:1-22) about
a rich young man who came to Jesus and asked how he could have eternal life.
Jesus told him to obey the commandments: do not murder, do not steal, do
not commit adultery, etc. The young man said he obeyed all the commandments
 what else? So Jesus told him to give away all his possessions and
follow Him. The young man turned away; he couldn't part with his money. Money
and possessions had first place in his life; they were his "idols," and they
kept him from Christ.

Materialism and greed and pleasure are the idols people
worship today. We see many families where the parents have had good upbringing;
they come from Christian homes, and we wonder, "Why are their families falling
apart and their kids having such serious problems?" Yet in Exodus 20, God
says He is a jealous God; if people bow down to other gods, he will punish
the children for the sins of the parents to the third and fourth generation!
This may be part of God's judgment on our society. American culture is focused
heavily on materialism; we are crowding God out of our lives.

In one sense children are paying the price; they are
suffering the effects of having our priorities in the wrong places. Families
fall apart because easy pleasure is more important than hard work, because
getting money  sometimes any way they can  is more important
than sacrificing for their families. The kids' heroes are rock stars and
movie stars and sports stars  many of whom are self-indulgent and live
immoral lifestyles.

We need to help our children understand that nothing
should replace God in our hearts. But first we have to ask

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ourselves to what degree we are worshiping the idols of
money and possessions and pleasure. We must put God first in our lives and
be obedient to His way, and then these other things will take their proper
place in our families.

3. "You shall not misuse the name of the Lord your
God" (Exodus 20:7). To a lot of people God and Jesus Christ are nothing
more than swear words. How we obey this commandment often reflects whether
the first and second commandments have any reality in our lives. If our children
hear us using God and Jesus Christ as swear words, they will have very little
reason to respect and love God the Father or His Son Jesus
Christ.

The same is true in how we speak to each other. If our children
hear us using derogatory names ("Stupid!" "Bitch!" "Dummy!" or worse), there
will be little respect for each other in the family. And psychologists have
discovered that people who suffer from loss of self-esteem were often verbally
abused and put down by their parents. Children tend to believe what their
parents tell them; if they are characterized as "stupid" or "good for nothing,"
they will believe that that is true about themselves. The good news is that
encouraging words ("you can do it!", "I believe in you") can help our children
develop a healthy sense of self and become caring, responsible
adults.

Another aspect of profanity that concerns us is how
God's gift of sex has been dragged through the gutter. How can children develop
a reverence and respect for sexual intimacy if we include sexual profanity
in our talk? What used to be common talk in the Army and Navy has now become
common language in school corridors among young children!

Youth evangelist Josh McDowell once heard one of his
children use a sexually explicit word. He asked if the child knew what it
meant, and the child said no. So Josh used the occasion (these are "teachable
moments"!) to tell the child exactly what it meant, how and when it was
appropriate

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to talk about sexual things, and that all aspects of sex and sexuality
should be respected as God's gift for married
couples.2

We must teach our children that how we talk is important;
it shows who we really are inside. Jesus said, "You brood of vipers, how
can you who are evil say anything good? For the mouth speaks what the heart
is full of. A good man brings good things out of the good stored up in him,
and an evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in him. But
I tell you that everyone will have to give account on the day of judgment
for every empty word they have spoken. For by your words you will be acquitted,
and by your words you will be condemned." (Matthew 12:34-36)

We should talk with our children about the profanity
in the music they listen to, the movies they see, and books they read. If
they continually listen to profanity, they become insensitive to its
destructiveness and the attitudes it creates. Be aware of the rock and rap
music groups which are offensive and draw the line: "We don't listen to this
in our home."

Instead, we must develop reverence and respect, not
only for God, but for each other in the family, and show this by how we speak.
In this, as in all the other commandments that teach God's values, parents
must first be an example to their children.

4. "Observe the Sabbath day by keeping it holy"
(Exodus 20:8). Many parents wonder what this means for us today. In early
years, my brother Clarence and I lived for a time with our grandparents in
Oberlin while our parents were in Chicago on business. Our grandparents were
godly people and very strict about what we boys did on Sunday. It was a day
of rest. We wore our best clothes and went to Sunday School and church. After
church we all enjoyed a good dinner and fellowship together. Sunday was the
Lord's Day and we were taught to observe it in a manner pleasing to the
Lord.

Today many stores are open on Sunday, and families
shop for their groceries or work around the house and yard. Or people sleep
in, then pack up their families and go to the beach or play golf, attend
games or invite the

Page 95

neighbors over and spend the day in fun and eating. They may take
a day of rest but with no thought of giving time to worship God.

A mother asked us recently, "What's the bottom line
for keeping the Sabbath? Surely we don't have to go back to the days where
you hardly dared breathe on Sunday. On the other hand, how do we keep it
'holy'?"

This commandment goes on to say, "Six days you shall
labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is the Sabbath to the Lord
your God" (Exodus 20:9-10). We are not under the law relating to the Sabbath
in every detail, as the Jews were, but the spirit of the law is still vitally
important in our Sunday observance. The spirit of this commandment is that
we are to set aside a day from our other pursuits to worship the
Lord.

"Keeping the Sabbath day holy" means, first of all,
worshiping together as a family. Not merely sending the children to Sunday
School, or Mom and the children going off to church while Dad parks himself
on the couch with the Sunday paper, and later watches the games on TV. We
mean the whole family attending church together with the people of God. turning
our hearts toward God on the first day of the week is one more way to help
us keep our priorities straight, and to make Jesus the center of our family
life.

God knew what He was doing when He set aside one day
as a "sabbath rest." Just as our days are broken into daylight and nighttime
hours, time for work and time for sleep, so our weeks are broken into six
days for work and getting things done, and one day to rest, slow down, have
a change of pace. God gives us this commandment, not only for His good (to
receive our worship), but for our good.

Going to church together, having Sunday dinner around
the table, not having to jump up and get work done presumes a certain kind
of slowed-down time, where the family can talk and spend time together. And
if you can have this Sunday meal at a restaurant, or have it delivered to
your home, or prepare it in advance, that's even better!

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If parents make this an important priority, it can't help but nourish
and strengthen the family.

5. "Honor your father and your mother as the Lord
your God has commanded you, so that you may live long in the land" (Exodus
20:12). The Apostle Paul quotes this commandment when he speaks directly
to children: "Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right.
'Honor your father and mother'  which is the first commandment with
a promise  'that it may go well with you and that you may enjoy long
life on the earth' " (Ephesians 6:1-2).

Most of us parents wave this commandment before our
children when we want them to obey. "Children, obey your parents!" But how
many of us sit down and explain to our children the promise God gives to
those who are obedient? A child who rebels often gets involved in unhealthy
behaviors: running away, drinking or drugs, smoking, sexual promiscuity.
Natural consequences often follow, many of which can put a young person seriously
at risk, not only spiritually, but physically and emotionally.

Pastor John O'Dell in Dexter, Michigan recently gave
a series of messages on the family. He believes one of the primary causes
of poor self-esteem is the failure to honor parents. "Every time you look
in the mirror," he said to his congregation, "you see some reflection of
your parents. You may look like your mom; you have traits like your father.
And if you hate them, you're going to hate yourself. Until you resolve this
hatred and replace it with honoring them, accepting them for who they are,
you can never be at peace with yourself."

Some time ago a young man came into crusade offices
wanting to see Billy Graham. Dr. Graham wasn't available, so I was asked
if I could help. The visitor was clean-cut, well-dressed, but seemed obviously
distressed.

"I've got a problem," he said bluntly. "If you can't
help me, I've decided to buy a gun and blow my brains out."

"O Lord," I prayed silently, "You've got to help me
with this young man."

Page 97

"I come from a wealthy family," he went on. "About
fifteen years ago my Dad and I had a bitter quarrel over family business.
We said some terrible things to each other, and I haven't spoken with my
father since and he hasn't tried to contact me.

"Since then I've wished him dead a thousand times.
I hated his guts; in fact, I was proud of the fact that I hated him so much.
But, Reverend Jones," he continued, "in the last year or so this hate has
been consuming me. It's destroying my family life, it's hurting my business.
It's eating me alive inside. I want to get rid of it, but I can't. It seems
the only way to get rid of it is to kill myself."

I took him into the Scriptures and showed him Jesus,
the Christ of love. Only Jesus can take away our sins; His love is greater
than all the hate and abuse of the whole world. Christ wants to meet each
one of us at our deepest point of need and set us free. After a while the
truth broke in upon this young man; we knelt and he wept his way to
God.

"Dear God," he prayed, "forgive me for hating Dad
all these years. Take away the hate." In a few minutes he jumped to his feet,
smiling through his tears. I knew that God had touched his heart.

Then I pushed the phone toward him. "Here, call your
Dad. Ask him to forgive you."

He looked startled. "I can't do it! I haven't talked
to my Dad in fifteen years! He probably wouldn't even talk to
me!"

"But things are different now," I encouraged him.
"You've asked God to forgive you for the hate. You've become a child of God.
Ask God to help you."

He couldn't do it; finally he said, "Reverend Jones,
I promise, I'll call him as soon as I get home."

As he left, I wondered what would happen.

Later he told me that when he called, his father was
stunned to hear from his son after such a long time. "Dad," he said, "I'm
sorry that I've hated you all these years.

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Please forgive me. I'm a Christian now; I love you. I want you
to love me."

The father wept on the phone. He too asked forgiveness.
Father and son were reconciled through Christ, and both gained the peace
that had been missing for so many years.

Children learn values from the example of their parents.
Our children learn to honor us by how they see us treating our parents. Do
we gripe about "the old man" behind his back? Do we harbor grudges and ill
feelings for past failings? Or do we work out the problems we have with
forgiveness and grace? Do we treasure the presence of the elderly among us?
Do we provide for their needs as they get older?

God loves to keep His promises. He desires to bless
those who honor their parents from the heart. And families who honor their
parents create a link of love and strength between the
generations.

6. "You shall not murder" (Exodus 20:13). Respect
for human life begins in the family. Responding to pressures and problems
with violence has become an alarming problem, even in the home. Wife abuse
and child abuse are unthinkable crimes  but it's happening. And even
when it's not happening in the homes, it's happening out in the streets.
Young males think it's macho to carry guns; black on black crime is a serious
issue in the cities.

Barbara Reynolds, USA Today inquiry editor
writing in the newspaper's May 24, 1991 issue, comments: "We are witnessing
the re-enactments in living color of the sordid acts that have been perpetrated
on young people. Each day, many are being sexually, emotionally, and physically
abused. They live on a daily diet of TV violence and hardcore, anti-human
rap music, and they see people, sometimes their family members or neighbors,
killed and maimed on city streets.

and a child psychiatrist. 'No one talks to them or intervenes to
help. No one listens. We don't protect them. And they are angry. Their way
of gaining control over their pain is to act it out on others.'

"Unless there are drastic changes, troubled youth
can be counted on to continue acting out their worst nightmares," Barbara
Reynolds continued. "As for the rest of us, we'll just have to remember to
carry along our umbrellas."

Psychologists are saying that we are in danger of
losing a generation of young black men, ages thirteen to twenty, if things
continue to go in the direction they are now headed  if not to outright
violence, then to drugs, or prison, or AIDS.

Unfortunately, most violence is between family members
or people who know each other. We must begin at home, not only to instill
a deep respect for human life, but to learn ways to deal with conflict in
the home.

Jesus said, "You have heard that it was said ....
'Do not murder ...' But I tell you that anyone who is angry with his brother
will be subject to judgment. Again, anyone who says to his brother, 'Raca,'
[an expression of contempt] is answerable to the Sanhedrin [the court]. But
anyone who says, 'You fool!' will be in danger of the fire of hell" (Matthew
5:21-22).

Why is anger and contempt a form of murder? Because
it kills the human spirit. The young man we mentioned was on the verge of
suicide because of his anger and hatred for his father. Verbal abuse of children
can be as crippling and damaging as physical abuse  in some cases even
more so. Some parents pride themselves that they never strike their children,
but they dump anger and verbal abuse freely. Why are we surprised when that
child grows up, gets a gun, and shoots someone in a fit of anger?

We must first of all ask God to give us as parents
a deep respect for the fragile spirits of our children. Then we must teach
our children that attitudes lead to actions.

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Some parents allow their children to say, "I hate you!" And it's
true that we shouldn't force our children to suppress their angry feelings;
kids need to let off steam. But we can help them channel their angry feelings
into nondestructive language as well as nondestructive behavior. Encourage
an angry child, for example, to express himself and tell you what has made
him angry, or if you already know, allow him to talk about how he feels without
talking about hating you.

We must also help our children learn how to manage
conflict. We will talk about this in more detail in a future chapter, but
the home is a good laboratory; seemingly, kids are always fighting! Learning
to identify the problem ("You scribbled on my picture and ruined it!"), ask
forgiveness ("I'm sorry"), and give forgiveness ("I forgive you")
can be valuable lessons that will help children deal with more serious conflict
as they get older. Formally granting forgiveness is often overlooked; if
someone says "I'm sorry," we might say, "Forget it" or "That's okay" 
or just stay angry until the feelings blow over. But truly forgiving the
other person can bring real freedom and reconciliation when a relationship
has broken down.

There is one last issue that must be addressed in
talking about respect for human life, and that is abortion. The issues that
cause a young girl or woman to seek an abortion are complex; many are tragic
situations. But the lives of millions of unborn have been snuffed out by
this tragedy; many girls and women have been damaged spiritually, physically,
and emotionally by aborting their children.

We must help our children understand that choices
have consequences, and encourage them to ask God to help them make right
choices. This is where strong values are critical: loving God, obeying parents,
reserving sex for marriage, reverence for life. But what if a daughter becomes
pregnant outside marriage? We encourage parents to forgive and counsel in
love. The easy way out may seem to be abortion, but we believe God's Word
clearly teaches

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that taking a life, though still in the womb, is wrong. We encourage
parents to read what truly godly
writers have to say on this subject, based on what the Bible
teaches.

7. "You shall not commit adultery" (Exodus
20:14). Teaching our children about sex is an important parental
responsibility. Some parents feel uncomfortable or awkward and hope the school
will do it. But our children are under a lot of sexual pressure from the
media, from their peers, from changing social mores. If we don't deliberately
teach sexuality from God's point of view, they will surely pick up their
values somewhere else.

If phrased the other way around, this commandment
would say, "You shall reserve sex only for the marriage relationship." This
means that we must teach our children, first of all, that sex is a beautiful
gift to be used only within the holy bonds of matrimony; outside of that
it's sin. It's important to stress the goodness of sex, protecting it from
attitudes and actions that would cheapen and abuse it.

Second, we must also teach that all other forms of
sexual intimacy (fornication, adultery, homosexuality) are wrong. And therein
is the problem. While society still generally frowns on adultery (breaking
the marriage promise), modern social attitudes generally accept sexual intimacy
outside of marriage between "consenting partners." But the Bible teaches
that this is wrong (see 1 Corinthians 6:9-20). Sex must be reserved solely
for marriage. Wrong practice of sex has resulted in many of the heartbreaking
social issues we face today: abortion, teenage parents, unwanted children,
AIDS, other sexually transmitted diseases  not to mention a general
breakdown in trust and commitment that impacts relationships when people
do get married.

There is a lot of energy directed toward teaching
"safe sex," especially after Magic Johnson revealed he was HIV positive 
using contraceptives, especially condoms, to prevent pregnancy, AIDS, and
other sexually transmitted

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diseases  but very little effort stresses the advantages
and freedom of abstinence. Happily, later Magic did begin to advocate abstinence
of sex outside marriage. At a recent youth night rally, I said, "In my judgment,
safe sex is no sex apart from marriage." I was surprised when the crowd clapped
and clapped and clapped. We need to help our young people understand that
God intends sex for marriage.

Of course, there will still be people who will have
sex outside of marriage. But that fact is very different than accepting that
kind of behavior.

In order for our children to have the courage to say
no to sexual pressure, we need to give them not only clear instruction, but
the inner strength of a healthy self-esteem. When children feel loved and
valued, they have less need to "follow the crowd" to gain acceptance
and approval.

Richard Durfield, senior pastor of San Gabriel Valley
Christian Center in Azusa, California, and his wife, Renee, developed a unique
way to encourage their children to honor God's commandments regarding sex.
As each child entered adolescence, the Durfields planned a special mom/daughter
or father/son time (such as going out to dinner) for a "key talk." The talk
covered many important issues, such as conception, the biblical view of marriage,
and the sacredness of sexual purity. It was also a time to discuss the questions,
fears, and anxieties of adolescence. Then the young person was presented
with a "key" ring, symbolizing a commitment with God to keep himself or herself
pure for a future marriage partner  a symbol of the key to one's heart
and virginity.3

8. "You shall not steal" (Exodus 20:15). This
commandment must be modeled within a context of being honest in all areas
of life. If parents tell little white lies, fudge on their income tax returns,
or make promises they don't keep, it's going to be hard for children to
understand what's so wrong about snitching candy from a store.

A friend of ours realized the grocery clerk had
forgotten

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to charge her for a dozen eggs. So she went back to the grocery
store to pay for the eggs. Her kids could hardly believe it. "Mom! It's not
like it's your fault  it's their mistake! Why bother?"

"Because," she said, "if the clerk overcharged me
for my groceries, I would certainly go get my money back. If I want the store
to deal fairly with me, then I must deal fairly with the store." We must
also be honest with our children. If we borrow something, return it; if we
make a promise, keep it; if we make a mistake, admit it and ask forgiveness.
If we treat our children and their "stuff" with respect, they will learn
to respect others and their things. We want our children to value integrity
and trust between people more than getting money or things (though this often
means respecting other people's money and things).

Another example is when the phone rings and someone
wants to talk to Howard (or to anyone), we do not tell the caller that the
person they want is not home if in fact they are home. We can say they are
"unable to take the call, but may I please take a message for (them)?" To
say they aren't home would be lying and teaches our children that lying is
permissible.

9. "You shall not give false testimony against
your neighbor" (Exodus 20:16). How easy it is to gossip about people
when they're not present  even our children! Children don't like their
mistakes and foibles held up for aunts and uncles or neighbors to laugh about.
Children want to know they can confide in you and you will honor their trust.
This doesn't mean we can never get some counsel and advice about parenting
from a trusted friend or counselor, but it does mean speaking of our children
with respect, even when they're not present. And if your children hear you
talking about others in a negative way behind their backs, they will fear
that you will talk about them in that way too.

An even more dangerous kind of gossip is passing along
hearsay information. "False testimony" rarely starts out as a bald-faced
lie. Even a "true" statement, taken out of context, can give a false impression
or create misunderstanding. And how often do we misrepresent the truth to
protect our own skins? (It begins early in childhood when Tommy says, "Sammy
did it!" Well, yes, Sammy broke the lamp, but only because Tommy tripped
him!"

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Too often we build ourselves up by tearing others
down. This is sometimes called "status by negation." This is common among
teenagers who tend to indulge in a constant ritual of "put-downs" 
which tend to mask their own insecurity. The easiest way to "look good" is
to make someone else "look bad."

A good rule of thumb for a family is to never say
anything when a person isn't present that you wouldn't also say if the person
were there. Think about it! Would that change the way we speak about other
people? About our children? About other family members?

What is true is the way we speak about individuals
is also true when we're talking about groups of people. Just as we want to
be judged on the basis of our character, not color, so we must do the same
for others. Are we guilty of dismissing whole groups of people just because
they're "rich folks"? "white folks"? "black folks"? "Northerners"? "Southerners"?
"liberals"? "conservatives"? What attitudes about people are we passing along
to our children?

It may sound simplistic, but as families we should
look for good things to say about people  even ones who are difficult
to like or get along with. This does not mean we should pretend real problems
don't exist; it does mean developing a respect for others. It is a lack of
respect for others that allows the weeds of prejudice, racism, bitterness,
and violence to take root and grow.

10. "You shall not covet ... anything that belongs
to your neighbor" (Exodus 20:17). This commandment, like the two before,
are different ways of stressing honesty and integrity in our dealings with
people. It emphasizes our family priorities and what we value most. Is it
relationships  or things? Do you feel competitive with others around
you? If Uncle Clinton gets a new car, do you suddenly feel like you need
one too? Are you always wanting more and more and never feeling satisfied?
Are you working two jobs to "keep up with the Joneses"? Are you jealous of
others?

This spirit of discontentment causes many families
to whip out the credit card

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and get themselves hopelessly in debt. Debt is a major problem
tearing many families apart; the money is spent and owed before the paycheck
even arrives. Some families borrow from friends or relatives to ward off
the creditors, further straining relationships.

Of course, "coveting" a neighbor's wife can lead to
stealing. But even if we do not act on our feelings, jealousy and envy build
barriers between people, and sometimes destroy the relationship.

We do our children and ourselves a favor if we cultivate
a spirit of contentment in the family. The Apostle Paul wrote, "I have learned
the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed
or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want" (Philippians 4:12). Avoid
comparisons with others; learn to enjoy family activities that don't cost
a lot of money; put relationships over material things; don't use special
occasions to openly criticize family members; respect the sanctity of marriage
(not only your own, but your neighbor's!); learn to budget your
income.

If your children complain that other kids have a lot
more money for clothes or bikes or video games, you may want to sit down
as a family and show where the money goes. If you give a percentage of your
money to the church or other charitable organizations, explain why that is
important  even if it means less spending money.

Jesus warned, "Watch out! Be on your guard against
all kinds of greed; a man's life does not consist in the abundance of his
possessions" (Luke 12:15). He also promised, "I am come that [you] might
have life, and the [you] might have it more abundantly" (John 10:10, KJV).
God wants us to experience an abundant family life  but that abundance
must come from the right sources.

A Summary of Values

Have you noticed? All ten of these commandments were summed up
by Jesus in this way: " 'Love the Lord your God

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with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.'
This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: 'Love
your neighbor as yourself.' All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two
commandments" (Matthew 22:37-40).

The first four commandments speak to the importance
of loving God with our whole hearts. The next six commandments show us how
to love our neighbors (family, friends, strangers, enemies). Love God ...
love neighbor  these are the greatest values we can instill in our
children.

But let's face it: these values are tough, easy to
say and hard to do. A wounded child  abandoned by a parent, ignored
or ridiculed, battered or neglected, craving attention or affection that's
missing at home, or lacking positive role models  is going to feel
angry, suspicious, and self-protective toward others, not love or respect
for them.

Notice that Jesus said, "Love your neighbor as
yourself." Loving our neighbor grows out of a healthy self-love, a sense
of security and love which enables us to reach beyond ourselves to others.
This is where the fine art of parenting comes in (see the next
chapter).

Some things to think about and do:

1. Talk together as a family about which of the spiritual
principles (the Ten Commandments) discussed in this chapter are highly valued
in your family. What events, interactions, attitudes, or behaviors among
family members show that these are highly valued?

2. Which of the ten spiritual principles have not been given
enough attention in your family? What difference would it make in your family
if your family made a change in those areas?

3. What other values do you think are important to teach
your children? Be specific.

King David wrote, "Children are an heritage of the Lord;
and the fruit of the womb is His reward" (Psalm 127:3). An old Ashanti proverb
states a similar thought: "Children are the reward of
life."1

Is this how we view our children? All too often the
modern parent seems to lose sight of this perspective. Children are an "unplanned
pregnancy" that throws us into crisis ... or around whom we juggle work,
day-care, church, and community involvements.

We have justified this low priority on parenting with
the cliché, "It's the quality of time spent with kids, not the quantity
that matters." But Armand Nicholi of Harvard Medical School says:

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Time and emotional accessibility are like the oxygen we breathe.
Although the quality of the oxygen is important, the quantity determines
whether we live or die. A parent's inaccessibility either physically,
emotionally, or both, can exert a profound influence on the child's emotional
health ... What has been shown over and over again to contribute most to
the emotional development of the child is a close, warm, sustained, and
continuous relationship with both parents.2

Dr. Nicholi notes five trends which have made parental
accessibility difficult today: (1) quick and easy divorce, (2) the increasing
number of women in the work force who have young children, (3) the notion
that to settle for the role of parent is "unfulfilling," (4) moving frequently
or commuting long distances to work, and (5) the intrusion of television
into family time. Dr. Nicholi believes these trends are "an extremely negative
influence on family life  primarily because they contribute to a change
in child rearing that has been taking place in this country during the past
few decades. The change is this: in American homes today child care has shifted
from parents to other agencies."3

The fine art of parenting begins with a commitment
to be a parent. If we believe that children are a gift and raising
them is important, we will give them priority time. This is true not only
of the mother but the father as well. Let's look at what children need from
their parents.

Fathering

In times past, many fathers felt they had accomplished their parental
duty if they kept a roof over the family's head, food on the table, and dispensed
needed discipline from time to time. Unfortunately, even this basic fatherly
role has degenerated. As previously noted, too many young men "prove" their
manhood by getting a girl pregnant, but take no responsibility for supporting
or caring for the child.

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And as discussed earlier, father absence or inaccessibility is
a major factor in our family crisis today.

What, then, is the role of the father? Fathers must
first of all reclaim the importance of providing financially for their wives
and children, to be the buffer between the family and the pressures of society.
To bring children into the world is to take on the responsibility for their
well-being and safety. It is grossly unfair to leave our women to shoulder
this burden alone. A real man will do all in his power to provide for his
wife and children.

However, it is possible for fathers to do this and
remain emotionally distant from their children. I would say even to fathers
who are unemployed or feel they can't adequately support their families:
don't cut out. The psalmist wrote: "I have never seen the righteous
forsaken or their children begging bread" (Psalm 37:25). It may not be easy,
but God will make a way for those who trust Him. There are things even more
important than money that you can give your children, which are essential
to your children's well-being. The first and foremost is a loving
relationship.

The involvement of a father in the lives of both his
sons and his daughters is crucial to their emotional development and sexual
identity. Christian fathers should take this role very seriously, for fathers
are their children's first image  for better or worse  of what
the Heavenly Father is like. Are you there when they need you? Do you listen
to your children's thoughts and feelings? Do they feel secure and safe when
they are with you? If they do wrong, is correction balanced with love and
forgiveness, or are you too stern and inflexible? Are you often angry and
unapproachable? Are your children afraid of you? Do you punish your children
just for making mistakes or do you know when their behavior is "willful
defiance"? Do you play favorites among your kids?

For sons, a father is the sex role model of what it
means to become a man. A father helps a son differentiate himself from his
mother and develop a healthy male identity. This is something that a mother
cannot do for her sons. If a father is absent, it's important for other men,
such as a caring uncle or an involved grandfather, to help fill this
role.

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A father is also essential to his daughter's sexual
identity. As a girl begins to see herself as a separate person from her mother,
she looks to her father to affirm her feminine development.

"A woman's father is the forerunner of all other men
who will enter her life and, consequently, he becomes her blueprint for the
entire male species," writes Laura Randolph in Ebony magazine. "Because
a father provides his daughter's first image of adult masculinity, he prescribes
for all time her understanding of what it means to be a
man."4

When the father relationship is absent, it can create
serious problems for young women learning to relate in a healthy way with
men. In fact, many girls who grow up without a father are often so hungry
for a man  any man  to love them that they are very vulnerable
to the pressures of men wanting sexual favors.

Once I was speaking to a large audience at a youth
convention. I gave the invitation and a number of young people came to the
front to receive Christ. The next afternoon my son, David, and I were sitting
on the porch of our guest cottage when a young woman approached us and said,
"I just wanted to tell you that what you said about the family last night
made me very angry."

"I take it you did not come forward to receive Christ,"
I said.

She dismissed my comment with a laugh. "When I was
about six years old, my mother brought me to this conference, and I went
forward with her. But now that I'm in business for myself and have everything
I want, I don't need God."

"What kind of business is that?" I
inquired.

"I'm a prostitute," she said, and waited to see if
I was shocked.

But I just asked, "How old are you?"

"Nineteen," she said.

I kept probing gently. "How did you get
started?"

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She sat down and told us a long story. She came from
a very wealthy family, whose parents gave her and her four older sisters
everything. Everything, that is, except love. "You see, my parents don't
love each other. They're always arguing and fighting. One day after a bitter
quarrel, I decided to take a walk. I had turned the corner when I heard a
car pull up beside me  a beautiful white sports car. The driver called
out, 'Hey, Baby. Let me take you for a ride.' I was frightened, so I shook
my head and ran down the street. The car took off.

"About two weeks later my folks had another terrible
fight, and I took another walk just to get away from them. Strangely enough,
this same guy drove down the street and stopped. 'Hey, Baby, remember me?'
he said. 'Get in the car and let's get acquainted.' That day I was so depressed
because of my family situation, that I got in the car and went with him.
We started dating and he said he loved me. But he was a pimp; he got me started
in this business. Now he takes care of me. I've got everything I want 
my own apartment, clothes, jewelry, expensive perfume, a car." She tossed
her head proudly. "I'm not one of those prostitutes that walks the streets,
you know. My clientele are up-and-up  doctors and lawyers  even
some ministers come to see me."

"There's one thing you don't have," I said. "And that's
peace in your heart. I know many nights after your client leaves and you're
left alone, that you're miserable and empty." She was quiet a few moments
and then nodded her head. So I went on, "That pimp doesn't love you. But
God loves you. He can be your Heavenly Father to love and embrace you and
care for you where your earthly parents have failed you."

I gave her my card and told her to call or write me
if she'd like. About three or four months later I got a letter from her.
"I'm writing to tell you that I gave my heart to Christ, and I found that
peace you talked about." Starting over wasn't easy because her past life
haunted her and she

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was afraid her pimp would find her and kill her. The last I heard,
however, she was coming along quite well. But my heart ached for all the
pain she had experienced because she didn't get that father love she needed
so desperately as a young girl.

Dr. Kyle Pruett, author of The Nurturing Father,
says, "Most children who end up without a father feel in some ways unfinished.
A lot of children never develop a strong identity. As researchers, we know
that boys never finish turning into men when their fathers aren't around,
and girls don't finish turning into women. The deficit is really a big
one."5

The good news says Pruett, is that when fathers get
involved with their children at a young age, caring for them, getting to
know them, enjoying them, it's good not only for the children, but for the
man as well. "A father who becomes an active part of his child's life knows
so much more about the complexities of relationship. He's more patient. Nurturing
fathers are described as more interesting people ... [They] lead more fulfilled
lives emotionally and socially .... [and] the children of these nurturing
fathers are more resilient and tend to have a broader range of problem-solving
skills."6

As our children were growing up, I was gone two or
more weeks at a time for evangelistic crusades and other meetings. This was
very difficult for me and my family. However, it was important that Wanda
was there for them during these times, and she held the family together admirably
during my absence and was always supportive of my ministry. It is only in
recent years that I've realized the impact these absences had on our five
children. But the Lord helped bridge these stresses in our family life, and
I always felt that it was a privilege to be a father. And now it's a joy
for me to see our children grown, educated, married, serving the Lord and
enjoying their families. I also find that being a grandfather is a very rewarding
experience.

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Mothering

In many ways the role of mother is better understood because of
the bonding that occurs between mother and child through pregnancy, birth,
and infant care. But even this role is getting lost in the avalanche of modern
social pressures for women to find a "fulfilling career" outside the home,
even in the early years of their child's life.

Dr. Nicholi notes that "many young women no longer
feel free to stay home with young children. Unless they pursue a career
while raising the family, they consider their lives a failure. [But]
my clinical experience indicates clearly that no woman with young children
can do both at the same time without sacrificing one or the other,
the quality of work, or the quality of child care. Many professionals
know this  but few have the courage to say
it."7

A woman should never have to defend being a mother
at home, giving priority to raising her children. Wanda puts it in these
terms:

As Howard's marriage partner, I see it as an awesome
responsibility  a God-given opportunity to be the best woman, the best
mother, the best wife, and the best grandmother that I can possibly be. But
it's not an easy role to fulfill. In our situation, I have had many varied
responsibilities. My husband was a pastor, then an overseas missionary, then
an evangelist. It was a challenge to support him and be a loving wife, as
well as sharing his ministry in many instances. As the children came along
 one, two, three, four, five!  I felt responsible to bring them
up in the fear of the Lord.

There are some preachers who say a woman's place is
always in the home. This is too simplistic. There are many women these days
who have to work  sometimes two jobs  in order to survive, especially
if there is no male in the home. Women shouldn't be censured simply because
they are working; the whole situation must be taken into consideration. And
a woman has many stages in her life;

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she may have many years before or after child rearing in which
to use her talents and education in a variety of ways.

When we returned from Africa, I was asked to teach
mentally retarded children at a nearby school. Even though my degree was
in Christian education, not special education, I agreed to do it "for a while"
 and ended up teaching for twelve years! Raising five children and
working with people in a different culture in Liberia had given me some important
skills and experience, even without a degree. I had found joy in staying
home and being a mother, but I also found God gave me the strength and joy
for this new challenge; it too was a rewarding experience when the timing
was right.

However, I am concerned that women who marry give
highest priority to their role of wives and mothers. It is a noble calling,
and women have unique gifts for nurturing children and building the family
relationship.

While fathers tend to hold their infants and young
children away from their bodies and play with them, women hold their infants
close. This body contact is essential for establishing a child's emotional
sense of well-being in the early months and years.

Because mom is usually the caretaker, especially in
the early years, children find comfort simply in her presence. If mom is
absent from the home, for whatever reason, there is a void that can't be
filled until she comes home again. I knew when I would come home from school,
the first person I would look for was my mother. I would join her in the
kitchen, munch cookies and milk, and talk about my day. When she died (I
was twelve), coming home to an empty house after school was
excruciating.

Women tend to be more sensitive to relationships than
men. If a child is hurting, the mother will sense this. If something isn't
working well in the home, the mother will often notice first and bring it
to the attention of her husband. She is usually eager to get problems smoothed
out and often plays the role of conciliator.

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Mom is usually a child's first teacher and plays a
tremendous role in character development: helping a child persevere in a
task, share possessions, he honest, be kind. If men are taking seriously
their role as provider, it often falls to the moms to train the children
to do chores and keep up with their homework. Training and teaching, of course,
is a task for both mother and father. It's especially important to
agree together on how to train the children, or they will pit mom against
dad and create disaster! However, it's often mom who has to carry out the
battle plan, so it's vital for dad to back her up and give her support. (Children
have an uncanny knack for discovering our weak points and wearing us
down!)

A mother's example also sets the moral and spiritual
tone for the household. It made a big impression on me to go past my mother's
bedroom and see her reading her Bible or on her knees in prayer. When things
got tough her calm faith seemed to pull us together. She always taught us
to never forget the poor, because "you may be in that situation some day,"
she'd say. During the Depression, many people would drift through our
neighborhood and come to the door asking for food. My mother never turned
anyone away.

* * * * *
* *

I join Wanda in pointing out that one of the greatest
gifts a mother can give her children is encouragement. Though limited in
education, Mom Jones was always learning. She and my father were very
knowledgeable of the history of black America, and told Clarence and me stories
of black achievements. Our parents showed us the importance of setting goals
and accomplishing them.

For Mother it was becoming a beautician. She and a
close friend took a courageous step back in the 1930s and enrolled as the
first black American women students in an outstanding white school of cosmetology
in Cleveland. The other students resented and rejected them because of their
race. However, Mother and her friend withstood the

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pressures for two years, graduated with honors, and later owned
and operated a successful beauty salon for many years in the
city.

After my conversion, the Lord called me to the ministry.
I struggled with the divine summons because I didn't want to be called a
"Jack-leg Preacher"  someone who preached one thing and did another.
But my mother would pray for me and say, "Howard, don't worry; God will make
you a good minister." This helped me better understand and respond to God's
leading in my life.

Mothers should be especially sensitive to the knocks
and bumps of childhood as children venture out into the world. When a child
comes to a mother for reassurance, how she responds will, first of all, affect
her own sense of confidence in who she is, and second, will teach her how
to deal with the problems she faces and the people she meets. For
African-American families, this not only includes all the normal problems
of growing up, but the painful reality of racial prejudice, which continues
to increase, not only in society, but also in many churches.

When our David was in kindergarten, he came home from
school one day crying. "Mother, what's the matter with my color?" he
wailed.

"Well," he sniffled, "some of the children told me
I was the wrong color."

Wanda was tempted to get angry, march over to the
school, and give the teacher a piece of her mind. However, she saw it as
an opportunity to sit down with David and explain how God made everything
in the world in a special way  including him.

"God made all the flowers with different colors and
He also made people of various races, cultures, and nationalities throughout
the world," she told him. "Some are black, some are white, some are brown,
some are yellow, and some are red people as we see in America. God made you
like you are;

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with God that's good. So don't ever let anybody make you feel
uncomfortable because of your color or of who or what you are." David seemed
satisfied and soon hopped off her lap to play.

But a child's self-esteem is fragile. We have pointed
out that the presence of both mother and father in the home is an important
ingredient in providing emotional well-being. But nurturing the self-esteem
of our children so they grow up into confident, well-adjusted adults is an
on-going task for single parents as well as two-parent families. Let's look
closely at this challenge in the art of parenting.

Single Parenting

Even though we have been emphatic about the important role fathers
play in their children's lives, at the same time we want to encourage those
single mothers who are going it alone. All is not lost. They have a tough
row to hoe, but there are things they can do to strengthen and build up their
families even without a mate. God is their source of strength; He has promised
to be "a father to the fatherless, a defender of widows [women without mates]"
(Psalm 68:5).

Some single mothers, especially in the black community,
feel they have three strikes against them: being black, being a woman, and
being a single mother. Welfare seems the only option  and in some cases
it is  and they fall victim to the myth that they have no future. But
single mother Sonya Henderson says, "For many young black women, especially
teens who are mothers, welfare is the only means of survival. Women who choose
to receive it should not be subjected to mockery. They should, however,
understand its function. Welfare is public assistance to the underadvantaged.
It is an aid to one's life, but it should never become a way of
life."8 Sonya Henderson tells how (after being abandoned by her
child's father and near-fatal suicide attempt) she realized she could let
her situation defeat her, or she could triumph over her
situation.

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She took advantage of the welfare benefits available to her to
go to school, get on her feet, and become a full-time employee, as well as
a dedicated mother.

But how can a single mother find the time, much less
the energy, for the art of parenting? First of all, find prayer support with
Christian friends. It's tough going it alone; it helps to share burdens with
others who can help carry them to the throne of grace. Secondly, a single
parent can find support for herself and her children through regular church
participation. She should look for a church that has dedicated Christian
men involved with the youth, either as Sunday School teachers or youth leaders.
These "spiritual fathers" can help provide some of the role models and
relationships with men her children need. Also, attending church together
can give the single mother's family a sense of unity and strength that may
be lacking if members go their own way.

What is the status of the child's father? If he is
around and willing to be involved with his child, the single mother should
encourage the relationship if at all possible. (Obviously, some men have
abandoned their children, are abusive, or are abusing drugs or alcohol in
a way that would be harmful.) The mother must not belittle the father in
front of the children; they need to love and respect both parents. This,
of course, is also true for fathers who are raising their children alone.
The need of children to have a loving relationship with adults of both sexes
is a compelling reason for a divorced or never-married parent to maintain
contact with the noncustodial parent.9

Another relationship that should be cultivated is
with the extended family. A child without a father in the home will benefit
from regular contact with uncles and aunts, cousins, and grandparents. These
extended family members can perform some of the developmental tasks that
a parent alone is not able to do.

If a working parent (single or married) must use day
care, he or she should choose carefully. Many churches

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run day-care centers; attention should be given to choose one that
has a good reputation and a high ratio of caretakers to children. For instance,
the Reba Place Day Nursery in Evanston, Illinois, a church-related center,
has a open-door policy: parents are welcome to drop in at any time. This
puts parents' fears to rest who have heard horror stories of child abuse
in day care centers.

Last but not least, the single parent should not try
to be "super parent" to compensate for the absent parent. It's not an admission
of failure to ask for help. All parents, whether married or single,
can grow in the fine art of parenting  especially in learning how to
communicate with their children, and learning to discipline successfully.
As we look at these next two areas in the next chapter, let's also resolve
to pray for one another, support one another, and learn from one another
 married and single parents alike.

Some things to think about and do:

1. As a parent, what do you think is the most important
thing you can give to your children? What changes might this mean
in the choices you make day to day?

2. If you are a single parent, what types of support do
you have in helping to parent your child, especially in providing relationship
with a caring adult of the opposite sex? What types of support would be helpful
to develop?

3. Read a book on parenting with your spouse (or another
parent) and discuss each chapter.

Footprints of Jesus, leading the way,Footprints of Jesus, by night and by day;Sure if I follow, life will be sweet!Saved by the prints of His wounded feet.

Lucie E. Campbell

While traveling by plane to an evangelistic crusade, I noticed
a mother and father with two small children seated nearby. As we were taxiing
down the runway, the stewardess said to the father, "I'm sorry, sir, but
you'll have to hold your daughter in your lap. She's too little to sit with
the seatbelt."

"Well, I don't know  I'll have to ask my daughter,"
he said. "Do you want to sit on my lap, Honey?"

The stewardess said, "I don't care what your daughter
wants. She has to sit on your lap; that's the law."

I was astonished when the father again said to the
child, "Well, Honey, what do you want to do?"

At that, the stewardess got angry. But to show her
independence, the little girl went to her mother and sat on the mother's
lap!

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Another time Wanda and I were visiting a home where
the mother asked her small son to do something and he said, "No."

"Johnny ... " she pleaded.

"No, I won't!" he said defiantly and ran
off.

The mother was embarrassed. She turned to us
apologetically and said, "We can't do a thing with Johnny."

I thought to myself, "I'd like to have Johnny for
about twenty minutes."

There is a great deal of confusion about discipline
of children today. Parents are frightened by all the terrible reports about
child abuse. So they hesitate to cross their children or impose limits. As
a result, we see teenage "Johnnies" giving orders to their parents. Even
in many Christian families, the kids are running the home. Some teachers
refuse to teach junior or senior high school because the kids are so unruly,
even threatening the teachers with violence.

These are conditions under which everyone realizes
that something has gone wrong with the way a child has been raised. But where
did it go wrong? Training up a child in the way he or she should go involves
more than just "lowering the boom." Let's look at some of the fundamentals,
which include  but are not limited to  correction for
misbehavior.

Building Self-Esteem In Your Child

In the last chapter we mentioned how important parents are in building
a child's self-esteem, but we did not explain why this is so important or
break the process down into its essential components. One of the symptoms
of a poor self-image is when we cannot stand to allow others to rise above
the level we see ourselves. This is demonstrated in constantly intimidating
others, always needing to be right, and not being able to graciously receive
correction. Gordon MacDonald says, "Self-esteem is a very important
thing

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because somewhere in the middle of all this confusion [of the teenage
years] there needs to be a sanctuary of sanity to which one can return and
find the world right side up. Self-esteem helps teens know who they are.
Plus, they need to know that their parents love and accept them, no matter
what."1

In their book, Just Me and the Kids, Patricia
Brandt and Dave Jackson explain self-esteem as a three-legged stool. The
three legs might be labeled: (1) sense of worth, (2) sense of adequacy, and
(3) sense of identity. They go on to explain the three elements as
follows:2

1. Sense of worth. A child's sense of worth
rests on whether he or she feels loved and accepted. Whether single or married,
moms and dads are the most significant people for communicating this ongoing
love. This love and acceptance is communicated in a variety of ways, all
of which are important: direct statements ("I love you," "You're special");
hugging and affection; special remembrances (these don't have to be expensive
gifts); the provision of necessities; and even fair discipline which says,
"I care about you."

2. Sense of adequacy. A child's sense of adequacy
is the feeling of competence, causing him or her to feel, "I can do it!"
If children experience constant putdowns ("Can't you ever do anything right?"
"Why are you always so slow?"), their self-confidence sags and the "three-legged
stool" falls over. Because children usually look to the same-sex parent as
a role model, Dr. Dennis B. Guernsey, director of the Institute for Marriage
and Family Ministries at Fuller Theological Seminary, thinks it is the same-sex
parent who contributes most to this sense of adequacy. That is, the father
who has the most responsibility for instilling self-confidence in his son,
and the mother is most successful in communicating the same to her
daughter.

3. Sense of identity. A child's identity has
two important parts: a sense of belonging and a sense of being
a unique person.

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That is, a sense of belonging to the family group, and yet a sense
of being a distinct member within it. A sense of belonging is created by
family togetherness  developing family traditions, playing together,
doing chores together, telling family jokes and stories, discovering your
family tree, attending family reunions.

A child's uniqueness, on the other hand, can be celebrated
by encouraging a child to develop his or her own special talents or hobbies,
and appreciating what a child contributes to the family. Unfortunately, this
aspect of self-esteem can be damaged if a parent constantly compares one
child to another ("Why can't you be more like your brother?").

The identity leg of the self-esteem stool also includes
a child's sexual identity. Both the mother and father are important
in helping establish a child's healthy sexual identity. The same-sex parent,
for instance, provides the role model of what it means to become a woman
or man. But it is the parent of the opposite sex who affirms the progress
that is being made along the way. A boy, for instance, may feel he'll never
measure up to his strong, competent dad, but as Mom depends on him to do
things which require his growing strength, he realizes he's becoming a man.
His sexual identity is affirmed. In a similar way, a father can affirm that
his daughter is delightfully different from him  even in the simple
affectionate greetings, "How's my sweetheart?" and "Your hair looks great,
Honey!"

Building healthy self-esteem in our children is not
automatic, even in two-parent families. We need to understand the crucial
role both parents play in either affirming and building up our children ...
or belittling them and putting them down. And even though a single parent
can't be both mother and father to one's child, there are ways a single parent
can compensate. One of these ways is to be deliberate about providing
relationships for the children with role models of the same sex as the missing
parent.

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Developing Good Communication

Another important parenting skill is good communication, both between
the parents and with the children. Love and good intentions aren't always
enough if family members misunderstand each other or miss what's really going
on. Unfortunately, many parents don't come by this skill naturally. And when
we finally figure out how to communicate with our preschoolers, suddenly
they're school children and then teenagers; at each stage we have to start
all over again!

We want to emphasize this point, not because Wanda
and I have been perfect parents in this area, but because we're still learning
and realize its importance.

Josh McDowell has declared, "You can have all the
rules you want in a family, but if you don't have relationships with your
children you are going to have rebellion instead of response. Good relationships
are built on mutual respect ... Respect begins with listening. If you feel
that someone is listening to you, you feel
respected."3

Consider the following ways to develop good
communication:

Concentrate on listening. Strangely enough, the foundation
of good communication is not talking but rather listening. One teenager said,
"I try to share something with my parents, and as soon as I open my mouth,
they start quoting the Bible. I don't want the Bible quoted; I just want
them to listen to me."4 It's so tempting to give our children
"the right answers" before we've really heard what they're saying. Our daughter
Lisa reminds us that when she was ten or eleven, she once came home from
school upset because some of the kids had teased her with racial slurs. We
tried to encourage her by telling her that even Jesus was persecuted. But
what she really wanted was for us to just listen to her feelings. And it's
true; even Scripture warns us, "Be quick to listen, slow to speak" (James
1:19).

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Listening means more than saying, "Uh-huh," as our
kids jabber away. We need to give them our undivided attention, put down
what we're doing, and look them in the eye. We can ask a question to be sure
we really understand or draw out our child, but we must fight the temptation
to do all the talking ourselves.

Find time to talk. Concentrated listening often
means finding time when kids feel free to talk. This doesn't often happen
in the hustle-bustle of the day. Just before bedtime, when there are no
distractions of phone, TV, homework, or visiting friends can be a good time
to check in about the day's happenings. (It's surprising how many kids are
willing to talk if it means delaying "lights out"!) Some parents schedule
one-on-one time with each of their kids by going out for breakfast, taking
a child along in the car while doing an errand, or going for a walk. A brief
period of "debriefing" right when a child gets home from school, or
when everyone gets home in the evening, is also a useful daily
communication.

Learn your child's language. In order to know what our children
are saying when they talk to us, we need to "speak their language." If your
child comes home banging doors and snapping at his or her siblings, do you
react to the behavior  or ask yourself, "What's Mary/Johnny really
trying to say?" Also, if we want to communicate with our child on his or
her level, or even know how to ask intelligent questions, we need to understand
something of our child's world. Do we know our children's friends? Their
favorite music? The current fads and lingo? Do we care enough to be conversant
about what interests them?

Be specific when you give instructions. Don't expect your
son or daughter (or your spouse!) to read your mind. It may be obvious to
you that "come home early" means 10 o'clock, but unless you've been specific,
your child may think "early" means by midnight. Don't just say, "Clean the
living room" if you really mean vacuum the rug, straighten the newspapers,
and dust all the furniture.

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The more specific we are when we give instructions to our children,
the less misunderstanding and frustration there'll be.

Be willing to admit when you're wrong. Parents aren't perfect.
We know that; but here's the catch: our kids know it too! However, if we
can't admit when we've made a mistake, our kids will feel it's useless to
talk to us. ("Why talk to Dad? He'll never admit he was wrong.") However,
if we're willing to say "I'm sorry," it paves the way for our kids to admit
when they've blown it. Contrary to a popular misconception, kids don't lose
respect for parents who admit when they're wrong. Rather, they learn to trust
that we're real people, who will understand and accept them when they make
mistakes, as well.

Keep your children's confidences. Kids who risk sharing
their deepest thoughts and feelings with a parent won't risk it again if
the parent blabs to other family members, friends, or relatives. Respecting
your children (and keeping the door to communication open) means respecting
your children's confidences.

Take their thoughts, ideas, and feelings seriously. It's
so easy to brush off a child's opinion as irrelevant, or take a problem lightly.
"Oh, you'll get over it," we say to some childish disappointment, or "Who
asked you?" if a child ventures an opinion. To encourage communication, parents
should look for opportunities to ask questions: "What do you think?" "How
did that make you feel?" "What are you going to do about it?" "When we do
this, we are communicating that a child is important to us, and what he or
she thinks, feels and does is important too.

Parents also need to be alert to "communication killers."
Here are a few of the most common ones:

Uncommunicated expectations. A lot of misunderstanding is
the result of "assuming" instead of "communicating." A wife may assume her
husband will know that saying "I'm tired" means "I need help preparing supper"
or "can we eat out instead?"; we assume our child knows not to eat all the
Halloween candy at one sitting.

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Not so. If we jump all over our spouse and children for things
that haven't been clearly spelled out, we have fights instead of
communication.

Poor timing. Just when a child is dashing out the door to
school is not the time to unload your frustration about bad grades. Or when
a child is playing with friends is not the time to ask, "Tommy, did you wet
the bed last night?" We will get a better response from our children if we
look for the right time to deal with problems  usually in private and
when there's time to really talk about it.

Put-downs and cheap shots. Sometimes we "communicate" our
frustrations with so-called humor at our child's expense ("Yeah, Tina's wearing
our vacation on her teeth"  referring to new braces). Or we hang labels
on our kids, like "Clumsy" or "Stupid." The result is that kids tend to withdraw
rather than risk being vulnerable.

Anger. Unfortunately, if we yell at our kids or discipline
them in anger, all our kids hear is, "Mom's mad!" and what we really want
to communicate gets lost.

Always ... never. It's tempting to overstate problems: "Why
are you always late?" "You never listen to me!" Kids will get defensive and
the argument escalates ... or else they'll back off and feel it's useless
to talk to you.

Inconsistency. If we say one thing and do another, it's
going to go in one ear and out the other. Or if we tell them to do something
and don't follow through, our children will learn they don't have to pay
attention.

The art of communication is something we may have
to work on all our lives. And it's never too late to learn communication
skills to help improve our family relationships. Good communication also
helps lay the groundwork in the area of discipline.

Practicing Positive Disciplines

When children come to our Christian Family Outreach summer camps,
they're confronted with the rules:

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"No radios or TVs ... no smoking ... get up when the bell rings
... no foul language." Many kids rebel at these rules. "Nobody tells me what
to do at home," they growl. But those that don't kick in, we send home. For
those who stay, it's amazing what happens after two or three days, when they
realize that we love them, and they can have a good time even with the rules
being what they are. Then they simmer down, and some receive Jesus Christ
as Savior. When the happy campers return home, their parents are impressed
with positive changes they witness in their children.

If we are concerned about young people who are cutting
short their lives through drug dealing and criminal activity, we must first
regain control of our own children. Discipline begins in the home. But what
is good discipline? How can a modern parent determine the difference between
discipline and abuse?

The fine art of parenting means understanding the
kinds of behaviors appropriate for children at different ages. As children
explore, learn, and test the waters of their environment, there will be spilled
milk, messes, and cries of frustration. But childish behavior is not the
same as defiance. Little children are not miniature adults; we must allow
for immaturity and accidents along the way.

At the same time, parents must take seriously the
task of setting limits on behavior and guiding our children along the way.
When we think of discipline, the first thing that comes to our mind is usually
punishment. But discipline includes teaching, training, setting parameters/
boundaries, as well as correction for wrong-doing.

The Apostle Paul wrote, "Do not make light of the
Lord's discipline, and do not lose heart when He rebukes you, because the
Lord disciplines those He loves, and He punishes everyone He accepts as a
son" (Hebrews 12:5-6). Parents who truly love their children will discipline
them, just as the Lord corrects us.

However, Paul also said, "Fathers, do not exasperate
your children; instead, bring them up in the training and

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instruction of the Lord" (Ephesians 6:4). The King James
Version says, "Do not provoke your children to wrath [anger]." If our
discipline is too harsh, we may create angry, rebellious children or possibly
break their spirit.

We must avoid the two extremes: permissive parenting,
which lacks control; and authoritarian parenting, which controls too harshly.
It's important for parents to remember that the goal of control is teaching
our children self-control; the goal of discipline is teaching our children
to be self-disciplined. It's hard for us as parents to work ourselves
out of the job! But that is our goal. If we set reasonable limits for our
children, are consistent in our discipline, and couple firmness with love
and affection, our children will grow in their ability to make responsible
decisions on their own.

"What about spanking?" you may be asking. Young children
cannot understand reasons for not running into the street or touching the
hot stove. However, a spank on the hand or three or four swats on the bottom
may help them obey when safety is the issue. Dr. James Dobson of Focus on
the Family advises parents to reserve spanking for deliberate disobedience
 not childish actions such as spilling the milk or forgetting to shut
the door. When it comes to eating certain foods, some children, though they
might try to eat them, are unable to do so. For this they ought not be spanked.
You can try to make eating these foods into a game or some form of fun, but
to spank a child for this will not accomplish the desired result.

Spanking, as a form of discipline (Proverbs 13:24)
is part of a process, which includes communication between parent
and child, and a resolution which includes forgiveness and reconciliation.
This should not be confused with hitting a child, which is usually a
reaction on the part of the parent who lashes out in anger or frustration.
Children should not be jerked, slapped, hit, or otherwise physically manhandled
in an uncontrolled way. In an article in Family Life Today magazine,
Neta Jackson says that spanking is appropriate only for younger children
and should include these ingredients:5

Do not spank in anger. Give yourself a cooling off period;
talk with your spouse or a friend, and consider

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what is the most effective punishment for misbehavior.

Talk with your child about why you are giving a spanking.
"You disobeyed Mommy (or Daddy)" is the key message.

Tell your child what to expect. Tell the child how many
swats you are going to deliver ("I am going to give you five spanks"). This
is to let your child know you are in control.

Don't remove clothing. If the bottom is too well padded,
spank on the upper leg. You don't want any sexual confusion.

Assure your child of your love and forgiveness. After the
spanking, hold your child while he or she cries. Then talk again ("Are you
sorry you disobeyed Mommy?"). If your child is repentant, be sure to hug
and say, "I forgive you!"

As children get older, however, there are other forms
of discipline which can be very effective. Let's explore some of
these:

Direct communication. We don't mean lecturing at; we mean
talking with the child. If this is the child's first infraction of the rule,
you might want to sit down and discuss what went wrong. You might discover
it was a case of miscommunication or misunderstanding. Or if there's a problem
affecting everyone, call a family council and have the whole family talk
and decide what to do. Children will appreciate your not jumping to conclusions,
and including them in helping to determine the solution.

Logical consequences. This is simply, "Let the punishment
fit the crime!" If Mary doesn't pick up her toys when told to, you might
remove the toys and put them away for a few days. If teenager Tommy comes
home an hour after curfew, he loses the privilege of going out for a week.
If you get a note from a teacher that Susie is missing ten homework assignments,
it would be logical to ground Susie until

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all the assignments have been completed and turned in. This method
of correction can be highly effective, though it sometimes takes careful
thought and monitoring.

Loss of privileges. This form of punishment can be used
as a "logical" consequence; or it might be used even when it has no direct
relation to the misbehavior. However, it's important that the loss of privileges
(which might be watching TV, going out with friends, using the telephone,
getting allowances, using the car) be something that matters to the
child.

Grandma's rule. This is known as "work before play," or
roughly translated: Use what the child wants to do as a motivator to do what
you want him to do! Grandma's rule can be used in simple situations: "I will
continue reading the story as soon as you quit talking"; or more complex
situations: "You may get your driver's license when you bring up those grades
to a C average." It works best when stated positively ("You can go out to
play as soon as the dishes are done" rather than "No, you can't play until
you do those dishes").

Positive rewards. Sometimes positive rewards can help children
correct negative behavior. One little girl was touchy and threw a tantrum
when her big brother so much as looked at her. This same girl also wanted
pierced earrings. Her parents got a roll of "tickets" and told their daughter
that when she earned fifty tickets (one ticket a day for not fussing at her
brother), she could get her ears pierced. It took sixty-five days, but her
parents proudly told her, "You not only look grown up on the outside with
your earrings, but you've grown up on the inside too!"

Effective discipline isn't easy; we've made our share
of mistakes. But we do our children a favor if we correct them in love. "No
discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it
produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained
by it" (Hebrews 12:11).

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Some things to think about and do:

1. Think about your own self-esteem. Do you feel secure
enough in who you are that you can build up your children? Think back over
the past week and name ways that you have told each of your children: "You're
special," "You can do it," and "You belong."

2. What new things might you do to improve your child's
sense of worth ... sense of adequacy ... sense of identity?

3. What areas of communication need work in your
family?

4. Read through the Book of Proverbs with your spouse (or
another parent). What wisdom for parenting do you find?

Maintaining the strength of the family is a challenging
job, even when everything is going relatively well. But we also need to be
prepared for the rocky times, or they can tear us apart. In this chapter
we will look at ways we can build family unity  first through working
and playing together as a family, and then by strengthening our commitment
to the family in the tough times.

Developing Family Activities

Earlier we looked at the crisis confronting the African-American
family. In too many cases the home has lost its influence; more and more
kids are being "raised" on the streets. But one reason so many kids spend
their time in the streets is because it's bedlam at home.

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If the home can be a happy, attractive place, it can
offset a lot of the temptations that come to kids on the outside. Let's look
at ways we can make being together as a family a high priority.

Good Times at Home

When my brother Clarence and I were growing up, Dad would take
us fishing, spin tops, play marbles, fly kites, play baseball. Our house
was the "headquarters" for the neighborhood  Dad had baseball bats
and gloves and other things to share with other kids. He could be strict;
Clarence and I knew we had better toe the line. As a plasterer by trade,
Dad worked hard to provide for this family. But he was also a pal; he loved
his family, and proved it in so many ways.

Wanda and I enjoyed happy times with our children
as they grew up. We had fantastic times at Thanksgiving and Christmas and
celebrated birthdays in a big way. We'd have family picnics, attend a circus,
go to amusement parks, play and listen to music, go ice skating and fishing,
and engage in other sports. We would always find some fun things to do.
Frequently, we'd go shopping at the mall, and enjoy eating out
together.

I recall the time when our three daughters were invited
to sing one evening during the Billy Graham Crusade in Cleveland. They had
approached me earlier in the day and said, "Dad, Mother cannot go shopping
today, so would you please come along and help us select three dresses
alike?"

"Yes," I said, knowing from previous experiences that
shopping with my wife and daughters proved to be a long, tiring experience
for me. However, I was happy on this particular occasion that my daughters
wanted their dad to accompany them.

"Girls, may I kindly suggest, however, that before
leaving our hotel room, let's pause for prayer and ask God to

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please make this shopping trip a quick one." They agreed and we
prayed and in the first store we visited near the hotel, we found three beautiful
dresses exactly alike, with the correct sizes. It was a miracle, and we rejoiced
together that God had answered our prayer.

One slushy winter day I took David and Phyllis with
me to the mall. But Phyllis forgot her galoshes, so I just picked her up
and carried her across the parking lot  that is, until I slipped on
a patch of ice and she ended up sitting in a big puddle. She stood up dripping
with water. And we began laughing hysterically, along with David and other
shoppers who watched the whole incident.

When we were in Liberia, it seemed that we had more
time to spend together as a family. The compound for radio station ELWA was
right on the ocean, so going down to the beach was an easy way to have fun
together. The kids went to school only half days and came home for lunch;
Wanda and I were also home after our morning recording sessions. We all looked
forward to the afternoons and evenings for special times as a
family.

One day our seven-year-old David said the boys were
getting together for a kite contest. "Would you make me a kite, please, Dad?"
I didn't have materials to make a kite, so I said I couldn't do it. David
was crushed until Wanda came to plead his case. So I prayed and asked the
Lord, "What material could I use?" The thought came to use a sheet. So Wanda
sacrificed one of her sheets. I went to the carpenter's shop to cut some
sticks to my measurements, and we got the kite rigged up with a tail. We
then made a test flight, and it flew, though kind of wobbly. David was excited,
but I decided to make some more adjustments, and then the kite was
ready.

The next afternoon was the contest, and many of the
fathers came out with their kids and kites along the beach. At the signal
the kites were lifted in the wind. The sea breeze carried David's kite above
the other kites and over a nearby village and out of sight, and we won the
contest.

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David was overwhelmed with joy, and he still remembers that eventful
day in his young life.

Today, David is an ordained minister, has pastored
two Christian and Missionary Alliance churches, and is now a music specialist
for Christian Family Outreach Ministries in Cleveland. His wife, Cora, is
a guidance counselor at Westwood Junior High School in nearby
Elyria.

During our pastoral ministry in New York City, our
family would often go to the beach or to one of the city parks together.
Many of the families from our church would do likewise, with picnic basket
in hand. Almost all cities have areas for recreation  community centers
where families can play basketball or swim, parks, bicycle trails. But don't
fall into the trap of just "sending" the kids out; go with them.

In New York many of the parents who couldn't get out
to the parks would come out in the evening, sit on the stoop and visit with
neighbors as they watched their children play in the street. The children
really enjoyed this because their parents were showing them
attention.

Admittedly, we all have our busy schedules, but we
need to set aside one night a week as "Family Night." No meetings, no telephone
calls, no TV  just time to do special activities with the kids. Or
it could be Saturday or Sunday afternoon. The important thing is regular
fun times together.

But spending time together doesn't have to be all
fun and games. Unfortunately, one of the most important family times is slipping
away in many families today: mealtimes. We know some homes where the
kids have their own microwaves in their rooms, so they don't even have to
come to the kitchen for a snack! But when a family is too busy to even eat
together, family life starts falling apart.

We have always thought it important to eat meals together.
Mealtime is where we find out about each other's activities during the day.
It presents the opportunity

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to be an encouragement or to discuss some problem that may have
arisen. Some families put on the tablecloth and candles, even when it's not
a special occasion, just to give the message: "It's special to be all
together."

Families would be surprised how much time they'd have
to spend together if they would turn off the TV. Most families do not realize
how much power the TV holds over the family. (When we go to visit some homes,
someone is usually sitting there glued to the television while we're trying
to talk. If we want to pray together, some will turn the TV down real low
but won't turn it off!) Not only does television spew out a lot of violence
and other garbage, but it has replaced many other activities that used to
bring families together: playing games, music and singing, reading, talking,
doing crafts, playing outdoors.

Some families have had the courage to get rid of the
TV altogether. But most of us have had to accept that television is here
to stay, so we must learn to control it. Setting limits on the amount of
time the TV can be on, preselecting only good programs for the kids, turning
it off completely some evenings, choosing certain programs such as "The Cosby
Show" and other wholesome programs to watch together as a family, and taking
advantage of some of the nature or educational programs are some of the ways
we can rule TV rather than the other way around.

Reading aloud as a family is a wonderful together
activity. When our children were younger, Wanda especially read Bible stories
and other children's books with them. And as they grew older we read many
of the classics. Just recently our youngest daughter, Lisa, asked if we still
had her old Bible story book. When she was five years of age, she practiced
reading it for herself  she probably read it through five
times.

Lisa and her husband Michael Granderson, live in
Washington, D.C. She is the administrative service production manager for
Thompson Publishing Group and Michael is a computer programmer analyst for
USA Today.

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Going to the library together and everyone getting
books can be a great monthly outing. Choosing books to read aloud after supper
(enjoyed by all ages) might include C.S. Lewis' Narnia series, the Laura
Ingalls Wilder series about life on the prairie, biographies about black
Americans who have made important contributions, etc.

Music can bring families together. Years ago a good
percentage of black families had a piano. Someone in each family could play
and the family would sing together. This meant children were introduced to
music at an early age. An aunt or uncle who played another instrument might
come over on a certain night each week and there would be a good sing. These
get-togethers helped our children develop their musical talents.

Music is important to kids. Just look at the amount
of time they are glued to their radios! (or iPods)
But parents need to be aware of what they are listening to, reading, and
watching on TV. As their father I couldn't understand or appreciate some
of the music, it was so different from the music I had learned to appreciate.
So I would go in and listen to some of the cuts from an album; sometimes
I'd have to say, "No, you can't listen to this; the lyrics are off-color."
So we'd have to work through that. It wasn't always easy, but actually listening
to and discussing the music was better than just saying no to everything
or ignoring it altogether.

Today an interesting number of black parents are also
concerned that black films produced in Hollywood project most of the negative
side of black American life, and leave a bad and distorted impression on
the minds of our black youth.

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News reporter Jack Harris wrote a provocative article
on the matter. Here are some of his views:

Black filmmakers are caught between a rock and a hard place when
it comes to subject matter for their products.

What sells in the marketplace is violence, sex and
rough language. So marketing decisions call for violence, sex and rough
language.

"Boyz N The Hood" has grossed over $10 million since
its opening. And although the principal theme involves a black father saving
his son from the world of gangs, the movie is violent, full of sex, and some
of the roughest language in film history ...

What are black filmmakers to do? They know what sells.
Do they have special responsibilities because of conditions in black communities
around the country? Yes they do! Gang life is but a fraction of what is happening
in the black community in this nation ....

Because there are so few black films, the preponderance
of violence, sex and rough language sends a wrong message to the world about
African Americans.

Agreed ... finding more productive film subjects is
difficult at best. But with the black community under siege, often by its
own members, there is the need for black filmmakers to work
harder.

Every black person in America must join the struggle
for the betterment of black life  filmmakers
included.1

In view of this, let me challenge our white evangelical
filmmakers to produce some quality films that will project the good and wholesome
things being done by black American families.

Serving the Community as a Family

Another way families can build family unity is by serving together
in the church and community. Our first experience was many years ago. Wanda
and I had graduated from the Missionary Training Institute, Nyack, New York
(Known now as Nyack College), and after we were married, I pastored Bethany
C&MA Church for six years. It was during that time that Wanda started
our three oldest girls,

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Cheryl, Gail, and Phyllis, singing together as a trio in three-part
harmony.

They were about three, five, and seven years of age,
and they loved to sing in Sunday School and church services. Occasionally,
Wanda would sing a solo or a duet with me in the meeting, or I'd play a musical
number on my saxophone before preaching. The congregation enjoyed it. This
served as a good example to them of our family ministry in the church and
community.

As the children grew older I would take them along
with me when I went calling on other families. Our kids began to feel a heart
for people and ministry since they were part of it.

At radio station ELWA in Liberia, we were all involved
as a family doing radio broadcasts. Wanda and I had weekly programs. Our
girls, along with other children, did a broadcast each Saturday morning,
called the "Happy Half-Hour." Occasionally, David sang solos with the group.
Lisa was about five years old and kept busy playing with her little friends
on the mission compound.

On Sunday afternoons, one of the ELWA missionaries
came to our home in an old dusty, open Landrover to take our three oldest
daughters to a nearby Liberian village for a children's service. The girls
sang songs and told Bible stories using the flannelgraph. The children enjoyed
the meeting as did the adults. Our daughters returned home, rather tired
and covered with red dust from the roads, but praised the Lord for their
missionary service for Him.

The point is: look for ways to include your children
in the things that you do, especially in the areas of ministry and service.
Serve meals at your local homeless center ... if your gift is hospitality,
give each child a responsibility preparing for or entertaining the guests
... encourage the children to earn money for a family mission project ...
include a single mom and her kids on some of your family outings. Serving
together will develop important spiritual bonds for your family.

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Setting and Achieving Goals

An important part of work, play, and service as a family is learning
how to set goals and work toward them. One of the most important aspects
of this is the example you set for your children. Do they see you trying
new things? If you look around there are lots of opportunities for adult
education: learning a language, learning a new skill, taking a literature
class. If you haven't finished your education, if you're on welfare and need
new job skills, it's never too late to achieve something that will better
your life. If our kids see us setting new goals for ourselves and working
toward these goals, it will set an important example for them.

But it takes action. We have to work with our children
to give them the experience of setting realistic goals, deciding what needs
to be done to reach those goals, and then following through. Part of this
is teaching them the simple skills they need to get on in life. For instance,
my brother Clarence and I were taught how to iron our own shirts and do other
household chores when we were young (and I taught our son, David,
too).

Because of our busy schedule while living in Africa,
we had household help. But Wanda taught our daughters how to cook and care
for their own clothes. Cheryl and Phyllis learned how to bake cakes and cookies,
and Gail began to specialize in cooking macaroni and cheese. Lisa was too
young to cook, but she did a good job of tasting everything. Now when we
go to the homes of our daughters for a meal and compliment them on their
cooking, they say, "Well, Mom, you taught us how to cook!"

When it came to taking care of their clothes, the
children had a lot to learn, because they didn't realize what was involved
in keeping them clean and mended.

But we can't just tell our children, "Learn how to
mend. Do your own laundry!" We have to break it down into small steps so
they can master each one. One of the best

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ways to do this is to work together, especially when you're teaching
a new skill. (Working together also builds family unity; it's much easier
to do chores when everyone is doing chores. It can even be fun! Put on some
lively music, work hard, then engage in some worthwhile hobby when the job
is done!) Of course, eventually children need to be able to do the job
themselves. They won't always have Mom or Dad around to take care of the
loose ends.

My parents taught my brother Clarence and me neatness
in dress. We always had an inspection before we left the house for church
and other places, and many times I was marched back to the bathroom for further
attention. My parents always looked nice. But today you see many parents
and children who don't seem to care about their appearance or conduct at
home and in public places.

Appearance is important, especially in the
African-American community when you go out to look for a job. It's necessary
that we let our children know what's going to be expected of them. Today,
competition for jobs is keen. If we don't teach children the necessity of
a good education or of taking care of themselves properly, they will not
be prepared for getting a job. We told our children, "When you walk in, you
want to have a good appearance; you want to be able to speak properly. First
impressions count."

Teaching children how to set goals and master skills
around the home is good preparation for setting realistic career goals.
Unfortunately, many of our black kids want to be a pop star like Michael
Jackson, or they want to be a famous athlete like Michael Jordan or Barry
Sanders, and only a very small percentage of these kids are going to make
it in professional sports. But that's all many kids think of. I heard about
a young man who had played football with an outstanding college, but felt
dejected because he didn't make the pros. He had no other career plans or
aspirations. Now he's into drugs, and his family is distraught. The athlete
model was the only thing for him.

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We tell the kids in our summer camps that there are
other things in life besides sports. It's important, therefore, to discuss
the future with your children. We need to present a broad range of career
options. What about Christian service? Or does Paul want to be a lawyer?
What are the steps to becoming a lawyer? Explore this together. Does Jayne
want to be a nurse? Allan, a doctor? Do any want to teach children? Go into
business? Program computers? Be a musician? Be a journalist? Build houses?
Fix cars? Children should get involved in activities in the school and community
which give them experience in these areas. But they need our support as parents
to encourage them.

Giving our children a realistic and hopeful outlook
on their future can strengthen them when they face setbacks and
disappointments.

Commitment to Family in Tough Times

Every family faces tough times. I recall a very traumatic experience
we encountered a year ago. My wife joined our team for a weekend of meetings.
After speaking to a group of women, she became ill, with vomiting and some
loss of vision in her right eye. We rushed Wanda to the hospital, where two
doctors examined her and advised me to fly her back home immediately. Back
at the motel, my team members  crusade director Dr. Walter Grist; his
wife, Janeva; Steve Musto; and C. Edward Thomas  joined me in prayer.
They agreed to continue with the meetings so that we could leave for
home.

On the plane Wanda worried about her vision, and would
at times say, "Howard, at times I can see you clearly, but then you completely
drop out of sight." It was a real scary experience, but we'd hold hands and
pray for strength and safety in travel. When we reached home in Oberlin,
Wanda was admitted to the hospital.

Our doctor examined her and discovered that she
had

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suffered a stroke. He decided to send her to another hospital for
further tests and treatment. Wanda and I were stunned by the news, but encouraged
our hearts in the Lord and His Word. We knew that God always engineers our
circumstances for His glory and our good, according to Romans
8:28.

I went home and called our children, other relatives,
our pastor, and friends for their prayer support. The next day, I phoned
the Billy Graham Team office and asked for prayer for Wanda.

The following morning I received a call from the doctor
at the Elyria Memorial Hospital. He said that Wanda had definitely suffered
a stroke, and there was bleeding in the brain, and that surgery was needed
immediately to save her life. I urged him to proceed with the
operation.

Before leaving for the hospital, I paused for prayer
to commit Wanda to God's care and to ask Him to work through the surgeon
and his team. I then looked out the window and saw a large beautiful dove
on the porch. The bird walked about slowly, paused, hopped down the steps,
and flew away. I believed that God had sent the dove, a symbol of the Holy
Spirit and peace, to quiet my heart and assure me that Wanda would be all
right.

My daughter Gail and others joined me in prayer as
Wanda was taken to surgery, which lasted almost four hours.

Two hours passed and my dear friend and colleague
in the ministry, Billy Graham, called and expressed his concern about Wanda.
We prayed together on the phone for her recovery.

The operation was a success. The doctor assured us
that Wanda would be fine. Later in the recovery room she recognized everyone
and we praised God for answered prayer. After ten days she came home. In
the ensuing weeks, she made frequent visits to see the doctor. He was always
impressed with her progress, and would say, "It's simply amazing  amazing."
Yes, we knew that God had worked a miracle in answer to prayer.

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During this time Wanda was encouraged by phone calls
from Ruth Graham, Cliff Barrows, and other team members and friends across
the country. We were informed that delegates at the General Council of the
Christian and Missionary Alliance had paused to pray for Wanda's complete
recovery and health.

Today Wanda is enjoying good health, her vision is
normal, she drives the car, teaches at a women's Bible study meeting each
week, and speaks at various meetings. Tough times do come to families. But
when a family knows the Lord, prays and trusts the promises of God, they
can be sure that God will always give comfort and strength to go through
troubles and trials. The psalmist says: "God is our refuge and strength,
an ever present help in trouble" (Psalm 46:1).

The sickness, death of a loved one, unemployment,
debt, abuse of alcohol and drugs, fighting, and disagreements are just some
of the difficulties that constitute "tough times" for families. How do we
maintain family unity in the hard times?

Beyond Divorce

Many people see only two options when the family is falling apart:
divorce or staying in a miserable marriage. But the Rev. Willie Richardson,
pastor of Christian Stronghold Baptist Church in Philadelphia, says there
is a third option: "Change! Learn to love each other and work out your
problems!"2

Evangelist Luis Palau says, "To protect your marriage,
I encourage you to learn how to identify and overcome five typical underlying
reasons for divorce." In brief these are:3

1. Unreasonable expectations. We tend to expect
a husband or wife to fulfill all our needs, to be the perfect mate. "Sometimes
the key to improving our marriages is bringing our expectations down to earth,"
says Palau. Rather than

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depreciating our mates for their imperfections, learning to appreciate
their good qualities can radically change our way of relating.

2. Ungodly focus. The wrong focus can make
us feel dissatisfied with or create tensions in the marriage. Some people
focus on their children, others on themselves, some on their careers. The
only focus is Jesus Christ at the center of our marriages, which helps us
keep a godly balance.

3. Uncontrolled passions. Too many marriages
are wrecked because of unbridled appetites for material things resulting
in uncontrolled spending, sexual pleasure sought outside of the marriage,
or chemical crutches. But Scripture tells us to "flee the evil desires of
youth" (2 Timothy 2:22). Self-control (a product of the Spirit  see
Galatians 5:22) is essential for family unity.

4. Unforgiving attitudes. All of us have
shortcomings. All of us fail. All of us need forgiveness. If we harbor
unforgiveness toward our mates, it will strain and crack the marriage. But
Scripture encourages us to "forgive as the Lord forgave you" (Colossians
3:13).

5. Unbiblical presuppositions. Some people
play games with the Word of God to justify their actions. But both the Old
and New Testaments lift up marriage as a spiritual metaphor of our relationship
with God. The emphasis is on faithfulness and sacrificial love. Jesus said,
"What God has joined together, let man not separate" (Mark 10:9) and " 'I
hate divorce,' says the Lord God of Israel" (Malachi 2:16).

When families face tough times, it's important for
family members to renew their commitment to the marriage and to the family.
Even major problems can be dealt with if both partners have the attitude,
"With God's help, we're going to face these problems together."

Unfortunately, too many couples try to do this alone.
They don't want others to know they're having struggles, or they feel hopeless
that anything can be done. So they just gut it out, cover it up, or ignore
what's happening

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until their marriage or family is a shambles.

The problems many black American families face today
are real. We need all the help we can get. This book is one attempt to give
men and women, fathers and mothers, a vision for the family and handles on
the challenges they face. But a book can't solve anything; it can only help
point you in the right direction, beginning with the Lord
Himself.

In the back of this book there is a list of resources
for the family, such as Recovery of Hope, a network of peer support groups
and counseling centers to bring hope to hurting marriages. Your pastor may
be able to give you needed counsel or direct you to people or organizations
for help.

Above all, study the Bible, get on your knees and
pray for your marriage, your spouse, and your children. God cares. He wants
to make a way. But you must be prepared for Him to do a work within your
heart, lifestyle, and habits.

Problem-Solving and Conflict Resolution

All family members must learn how to deal with each other's
differences. "Just because husbands are men and wives are women is grounds
enough for disagreement," quipped one couple.4 We may have differing
expectations for marriage and family life, disagreements about raising children,
different temperaments, different family experiences when we were children.
Some of these differences enhance and enrich our relationships; other differences
seem to cause conflict.

Conflict isn't bad in and of itself; it's a normal
part of marriage and family life. Whether or not conflict strains family
unity depends on how the conflicts are handled. And little problems can become
big problems if family members do not know how to handle their conflicts
in a healthy way.

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Marriage counselor Norm Wright, in his book The
Pillars of Marriage, suggests five ways husbands and wives (and parents
and children) have of dealing with differences.5

1. Withdrawal. One or more family members think conflict
is not worth the effort, especially if previous conflicts proved negative
and didn't solve anything. Changing the subject, not talking, spending more
time apart, avoiding topics of disagreement are all symptoms of
withdrawal.

2. Winning. Winning or proving one's point becomes the major
objective. One person must be right, and the other person wrong. This style
of conflict often involves arguments, verbal fights, attacking the other
person, making judgments. The response is usually counterattacks or becoming
defensive.

3. Yielding. We must all yield sometimes, but yielding can
be a means of protecting oneself. We just give in and let the other person
"win" to avoid further unpleasantness. Anger tends to pile up, however, and
eventually comes out.

4. Compromise. Though compromise sounds good, it is based
on giving a little to get a little. It focuses primarily on the solution,
and not the process (understanding feelings, different ways of thinking,
past experiences). Unfortunately, one or both may feel some resentment over
what was lost.

5. Resolve. Truly resolving a conflict starts with direct,
loving communication. Each person tells his or her needs and feelings; each
person listens to and tries to understand the other. There is no attacking
or judgment of the other. Though yielding or compromise will sometimes result,
the understanding sought in this approach ideally helps the parties come
to mutual agreement on the resolution.

When families understand their own "style" of conflict,
they can often make adjustments to reach a better outcome. Some other tips
for "fighting fair" when dealing

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with a conflict: stick to the topic  don't bring up old problems;
avoid name-calling and words like "always" and "never." If you're angry,
take some time to cool off before trying to resolve the conflict; be willing
to apologize if you "break the rules." When the argument is over, a hug can
help smooth ruffled feelings. And it would be good to pray
together.

Marriage seminar speakers Randy and Therese Cirner
say, "The first and most important principle we've learned [to handle
disagreements] is to practice preventive medicine. We've found that by setting
aside a specific time each week  yes, each week  to talk about
the details of our separate lives, we prevent a number of disagreements from
ever happening. Good communications is the best preventive
medicine."6

Scripture is also helpful in understanding how to
resolve conflict. Jesus said:

"If your brother sins against you, go and point out their fault,
just between the two of you. If they listen to you, you have won them over.
But if they will not listen, take one or two others along, so that 'every
matter may be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses.' If
they still refuse to listen, tell it to the church; and if they refuse to
listen even to the church, treat them as you would a pagan or a tax collector
(Matthew 18:15-17).

Jesus was speaking, of course, about settling
disagreements between fellow believers. But there is truth here for married
couples as well. First, if you have a grievance, go to your spouse alone.
Talk about it together and do your best to work it out in private. But if
you cannot work out the problem between you, then go together to talk to
someone else who can give you spiritual and relational counsel  a pastor,
an older Christian couple, or a marriage counselor. If the problem is serious
or complex, it

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may mean extended marital counseling by a professional. Most matters
should be able to be cared for in this two-step process.

If the problem cannot be resolved, a Christian may
need spiritual counsel from his or her pastor or church elders. There are
other Scriptures which help us understand how a believing wife should relate
to her unbelieving husband, for instance, or how to respond if a spouse is
adulterous or pursues a divorce.

Forgiveness

We cannot stress too much the healing power of forgiveness. Our
marriages and family situations aren't perfect; we will fail each other;
we often hurt each other by our thoughtlessness or insensitivity. We will
face tough times that strain our unity with one another. But God's gift of
forgiveness is the key to unlocking the doors of bitterness and anger that
may be destroying our families.

It has been said that "a good marriage is made up not of
two good lovers, but of two good forgivers."7 When we are willing
to forgive, we thwart Satan who likes nothing better than to drive a wedge
in our relationship with each other. When we feel hurt or unloved, Satan
capitalizes on our natural human reactions of resentment, anger, and desire
for revenge by building walls of bitterness between us. But God has a different
method:

Now instead, you ought to forgive and comfort [the one who has
caused you grief], so that he will not be overwhelmed by excessive sorrow.
I urge you, therefore, to reaffirm your love for him ... Forgive ... in order
that Satan might not outwit us. For we are not unaware of his schemes (2
Corinthians 2:7-11).

Forgiveness is important, not only for the sake of
others, but for our own benefit. For one thing, God's forgiveness

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of our own weaknesses and failings seems to be connected with our
ability to forgive. Jesus said, "If you hold anything against anyone, forgive
him, so that your Father in heaven may forgive your sins" (Mark 11:25). For
our own spiritual health, we must seek to forgive and be
forgiven.

Lewis Smedes, author of Forgive and Forget,
adds that we do ourselves a favor when we forgive. "Suppose you never forgive,
suppose you feel the hurt each time your memory lights on the people who
did you wrong. And suppose you have a compulsion to think of them [or your
hurt] constantly. You have become a prisoner of your past pain ...
The only way to heal the pain that will not heal itself is to forgive the
person who hurts you. Forgiving heals your memory as you change your memory's
vision."8

Forgiveness changes the conditions under which our
family relationships can grow and thrive. We don't have to be anxious that
we'll make a mistake. (We are going to make mistakes; there's no avoiding
that.) If we develop the freedom to ask for and give forgiveness, small things
can remain small. We can pick ourselves up and go on ... together. But even
relationships seemingly broken beyond repair can be mended when one person
is willing to say, "I'm sorry," and the other, "I forgive you."
(See
Luke 17:3-4)

Some things to think about and do:

1. What kinds of family activities might help strengthen
your family unity? List two or three that you plan to implement in the next
month.

2. Brainstorm possible ways you and your children can serve
your church or community together. Choose one that makes use of each family
member and go for it!

3. What is your "style" of handling conflict (withdrawal,
winning, yielding, compromising, resolving)? What changes do you need to
make to resolve conflicts in a healthier way? Ask God to help you make those
changes.

4. Are you holding anger or bitterness in your heart against
your spouse, ex-spouse, or other family member?

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Ask God to help you forgive him or her. Seek help from your pastor
or another mature Christian to help you thwart Satan's plan to drive the
wedge of unforgiveness between you and your spouse.

5. If you are already divorced, what have you learned from
your experience to help you relate in a godly way to your ex-spouse? In a
possible second marriage?

We've come this far by faithLeaning on the Lord;Trusting in His Holy Word,He's never failed me yet.

Albert A. Goodson

Doris was tough. By sheer grit she had survived when her
husband abandoned her and their little boy, Nate. She worked hard to support
her child, and went to the bars at night to help fill the lonely places in
her life. When Nate was ten, she got pregnant again  a sinful one-night
fling with someone she met in the bar. She didn't want this child; how was
she going to support another one? But stubborn and stoic, she struggled on.
"My little girl turned out to be ... how do you say it? ... a blessing,"
says Doris now.

Doris' children wanted to go to Sunday School, so
young Nate took his little sister to the Detroit Afro-American Mission. They
begged Mommy to go, but she had no use for church. Doris was too sophisticated
for that religion nonsense, she said. But the children didn't let
up.

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One day Robbie looked at her mom sadly and said, "Mommy, when you
die you're going to hell."

Her daughter's words shocked Doris and she began thinking
about it. Was there more to life than struggling to make ends meet and looking
for the right man to end her loneliness? So one Sunday Doris went with her
children to the mission.

The people at the mission acted as if she were an
old friend! They hugged her and told her how glad they were to see her. "We
want you to come back!" they said. "Your children are so special." Doris
was dazed. All her life she'd struggled with feeling worthless and cast off,
but these people made her feel wanted. One day while attending a special
service with her children, Doris was asked by a kind sister if she would
like to pray with her. In a little side room, Doris asked Jesus to be her
Savior and the Lord of her life.

"All my life I'd had such a bad self-image of myself,"
says Doris. "But God came into my life and showed me that I am the temple
of the Holy Spirit! I am unique, His special creation, and He loves
me!"

Doris now sees Nate establishing a Christian home
with his wife and two little girls, being the kind of father he never had.
As for herself, Doris says she still struggles with the desire "to be with
men," but she has learned that prayer and the support of her brothers and
sisters in the church is very important to living as a
single.1

In the midst of personal crisis, it is easy for the
individual family to feel overwhelmed. And faced with the overwhelming statistics
regarding the crisis in the black family in America today, all of us are
tempted to feel despair.

But the Rev. Willie Richardson, pastor of Christian
Stronghold Baptist Church in Philadelphia, is not discouraged. "I believe
the family can turn around," he says. The key, Richardson believes, is the
black church.2

In his book The Church in the Life of the Black
Family,

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Wallace Charles Smith points up the interconnectedness of the church
and the family for African Americans:

The black family's chief strength is its extended nature .... Two
skills which have allowed for the survival of the black family throughout
the period of slavery and beyond are its adaptability to change and its extended
(rather than nuclear) structure ... The knowledge of these important family
attributes is crucial to the task because the black church is an extension
of the black family ....

The black church in America develop out of the deprivation
and oppression experienced by the slaves. In so doing, the black church existed
as a support system for the oppressed at society's breakpoints. Without question
the worst break point in this slavocracy was the separation of family members
from one another. Mothers, fathers, sons, and daughters were consistently
sold away at the masters' whims. The church evolved as a new family for those
who were continually being uprooted from their original families.

Sadly for many blacks, the secularization of the twentieth
century has exacted a great price. The church no longer occupies the central
position of authority in the life of blacks that it once did. This fact has
a great impact on the family.3

Today we desperately need to witness a moral and spiritual
awakening in black America, and this must start with the church. If African
Americans are going to find the strength to rebuild their families, and the
support needed to overcome the destructive pressures and problems of everyday
living, it's going to be through a spiritually revived church, God working
through the church for His glory and for the good of His people.

The spiritual revolution, then, is not going to come
through a new political order; it's not going to come

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through blue-ribbon studies or government money or social organization.
All these are helpful and needed, but fundamentally the frightening conditions
and problems that plague us will not change until the hearts and lives of
people are radically changed through a personal encounter with Jesus Christ,
the crucified and risen Son of God, our living and loving Saviour, and eternal
hope. "Therefore if anyone be in Christ, he is a new creature; old things
are passed away; behold, all things are become new" (2 Corinthians
5:17).

The Importance of the Black Church

Many years ago, noted black scholar Dr. William E.B. DuBois, aware
of the history, development, and importance of the black church of America,
gave his evaluation of it in his classic book, The Souls of Black
Folk:

The Negro church ... is the social center of the Negro life in
the United States, and the most characteristic expression of African character
.... At the same time this social, intellectual, and economic center is a
religious center of great power. Depravity, sin, redemption, heaven, hell,
and damnation are preached twice on Sunday with much fervor and revivals
take place every year ... and few indeed of the community have the hardihood
to withstand conversion. Back of this formal religion, the church often stands
as a conserver of morals, strengthener of the family life, and the final
authority of what is good and right.4

Even today, the black church stands unchallenged as
the oldest, most powerful, and most influential of all other black institutions.
While there have been and are black congregations within white denominations,
the most authentic "black churches" were founded and led by African Americans.
The black church is a preserver of our spiritual

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heritage, history, and culture, and continues to champion the cause
for civil rights and other issues necessary for the welfare and progress
of black America.

The black church has been a solid rock for African Americans, in
the face of the devastation of our social institutions. When our families
were torn apart, our enterprises usurped, our national affiliations erased,
and our possessions destroyed, the black church flourished to sustain African
Americans throughout our ordeals.

More importantly, the black church gave African Americans
the means to develop the energies, strategies, and abilities to overcome
these ordeals that we faced throughout American history. The black church
gave African Americans the community, consistency, concern and competency
to survive and at times even to thrive amid adversity. It was the only
institution in the past and, for most African Americans, in the present,
to be owned and operated solely by blacks. As such, it gave African Americans
the only opportunity most of us have had to develop leadership skills as
well as to nurture our self-confidence and self-esteem, even in the face
of great adversity.5

Preston Robert Washington, pastor of Memorial Baptist
Church in Harlem, New York, agrees but goes a step further. He says, "The
church is the single most prominent and important institution in the black
community. It is both terrifying and challenging to realize that as the church
goes, so goes the community, the nation, and in large measure, the world
...; hence it has been given a sacred stewardship trust to become all it
can be as an instrument of God's transforming
Spirit."6

Today, however, the black church faces one of the
greatest

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challenges of all times: the plight of black America and the crisis
in the black family. The fact that not just black families but families
throughout America are in crisis today is an indictment upon the church,
white and black alike. There are many notable exceptions, evangelical churches
that preach the Gospel in all its fullness to the hurting persons and families
in their communities, and these churches continue to grow.

But we also witness many other churches  those
like the church at Laodicea, spoken of in the Book of Revelation (3:14-22)
 that are lukewarm in the love for God and people. These churches displease
the Lord and lack the spiritual power to reach an increasingly sinful and
skeptical society.

For better or worse, the black church has more power
than any politician, because thousands and thousands gather every Sunday
for worship. If we accept that premise, then the black church has a tremendous
responsibility to the community. If the black church is going to meet this
need and be a force in this crisis, we desperately need to see a renewed
spirit within our churches.

A Call for Renewal

While talking with a black businessman in New York a few years
ago, I asked, "As you observe the black church today, what is your feeling
about it?"

The man thought for a moment and replied, "Dr. Jones,
I sincerely believe that the black church in America must experience a true
revival of the Holy Spirit, because for the most part, the church is failing
to provide a moral and spiritual dynamic we so desperately need to change
our situations and enhance the quality of our life and families and
communities."

This was an astute observation, one we believe is
still true today. The black church must realize that the greatest need among
black Americans today is neither freedom

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from the blight of racisim and discrimination, nor the securing
of civil rights, as great as these social, political, and economic needs
of our people are. Underneath these realities is a more paramount one, a
spiritual need. As a people we need to witness a moral and spiritual awakening,
for we have drifted from God and from the moral and spiritual realities that
are revealed in Jesus Christ and in the Word of God.

Why has the black church become spiritually impoverished?
First, the church has lost the vision of the purpose of the church; and secondly,
the church has drifted far from the divine pattern and program of the church.
Let's consider what this means:

The church should be a place for divine worship. We come
together to worship God. Unfortunately, in too many churches, the focus seems
to be on what we need. We've been in churches where Bibles are hard to find.
Sunday morning worship in particular should be a time of corporate worship
and praise to our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, along with exposition from
the Word of God.

The church should be a place for Christian fellowship. The
church should be a family of the redeemed, people seeking to satisfy the
requirements of membership in the family of God and heeding the call to be
true disciples. Some churches are so anxious for members, they simply ask
those who want to be a member of the church to come forward and receive the
right hand of fellowship. Many of these folks may be sincere and well-meaning
and may become good workers in the church, but some have never experienced
conversion.

The church is to reflect the holiness of God. While conducting
revival meetings in Delaware, a local pastor invited me to go visiting in
the neighborhood. As we approached one house, the pastor said, "Howard, the
man here was once an alcoholic, but he was converted and became an outstanding
Christian layman in our church. However, something went wrong in his life,
and he slowly drifted from God and returned to his old sinful ways. We have
tried many times to get him back to church, but he's not
interested."

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We entered the home, visited with the man a while,
then I invited him to our special meetings. He declined. When I asked why,
he said, "Because I don't believe in playing with God. You see, Preacher,
I once knew the Lord. Christ delivered me from a life of drunkenness, and
for a time I served God in the church. But after a while I got out of fellowship
with God, and the devil led me back to my old ways. So I stopped going to
church. But," he said, pointing a finger toward us, "there are plenty of
other people in the church who aren't living right either. On Sunday I see
'em going to church; they sing and shout, but I know for a fact that they
live just like the rest of us the rest of the week. Occasionally I see some
of the deacons duck into a nearby alley, take out their bottles and drink,
then walk on into the service as though nothing had happened.

"Now, sir," the man concluded, "if your preaching
helps those hypocrites to get right with God, perhaps I too will come back
to God and the church. But I don't see why I should sit with those who live
just as I do, but try to give the impression that they're
saints."

He was right to a point. Today church members must
exhibit more than just an outward form of religion and emotion displayed
in singing, shouting, and preaching. They need to manifest the holiness of
God in their character and conduct.

The church should exercise spiritual discipline of it's
members. The early church exercised the rule of discipline among its
members. Ananias and Sapphira are the most notable examples. This couple
plotted to lie about the nature of their offering to the church. The Holy
Spirit revealed their sin, and swift judgment and death followed (see Acts
5:1-11). The Apostle Paul encouraged the Corinthians to discipline one of
their members who was guilty

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of immorality, so as to maintain the purity of the church (1
Corinthians 5:1-5). But the rule of discipline has almost vanished from modern
church life. Leaders and members alike can sin and walk contrary to the Word
of God without fear of discipline from the church. How can we have a healthy
spiritual church, one possessed with the power of God, if there is no standard
of righteousness, and church members are not disciplined when they do
wrong?

The church is to be a place of prayer. We must return to
a ministry of prayer. Prayer is the Christian's mightiest weapon in our spiritual
warfare against Satan and the world (Ephesians 6:10-18). Jesus said, "Where
two or three come together in My name, there am I with them" (Matthew 18:20).
There is power in uniting our hearts and voices in prayer. Whatever weaknesses
we may be experiencing in our churches, whatever crises affect our individual
members and families, whatever challenges we face as a black community, prayer
should be our first attitude and our first action.

But, regretfully, we have far too many prayerless
churches. There may be tremendous crowds on Sunday mornings such as Christmas,
Easter, and Mother's Day. People will turn out for choir practice and social
and political meetings in the church. But what about the attendance at the
church prayer service? The weakest meeting in most of our churches is the
prayer service. Many churches have had to discontinue the midweek prayer
and Bible study meeting because the people have ceased to attend.

In prayer we acknowledge our need for God; in prayer
we call upon the resources of heaven. Robert Washington, pastor of Memorial
Baptist Church in Harlem, has said, "It is my contention that prayer is 'the
royal road' to church renewal."7 Nothing much of significance
in the church happens without prayer. "Unless the Lord builds the house,
the builders labor in vain" (Psalm 127:1).

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The church should demonstrate God's power. No one can study
the New Testament without recognizing that the power of the Holy Spirit was
present in the life and ministry of the first-century church. When the apostles
preached, thousands came under conviction, repented, and were baptized. Even
in the face of persecution and death, the church grew and
thrived.

In many of our churches there is an abundance of
emotionalism. In some cases it is carried to extremes. Granted, there is
a place for emotionalism in church worship, if it is stimulated and controlled
by the Holy Spirit and the Word of God. But emotionalism worked up through
human effort is utterly devoid of spiritual profit or
edification.

We face a crossroads for the black church: hope for
families in crisis lies in the presence, teaching, fellowship, and ministry
of the church. Yet before we can fulfill our divine role, we must experience
personal and corporate renewal, opening ourselves to the power and ministry
of the Holy Spirit. As Washington says, the black church "needs new zeal,
new purpose, new self-image, new leadership."8

It is this renewal (spiritual housecleaning and
reordering) that gives us the authority, power, and love to reach beyond
our doors to the hurting community without. "Renewal is not just what goes
on inside the four walls of the church building. As transformation becomes
contagious, it tends to raise the consciousness of next-door neighbors in
the community as much as it does the folk in the church. Renewal also helps
a congregation as it begins to build coalitions with other churches, social
service agencies, and political groups. The name of the game in renewal ministry
is God's power unleashed to transform institutions as much as it changes
individuals and families."9

A Call for Godly Leadership

Renewal begins with our pastors and leaders. Much harm is being
done to our churches because many of them have

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as preachers those who have entered a "profession" without first
having a "possession" of God in their lives. A conspicuous failure in the
ministry today, as we have mentioned, is the lack of upright, moral, righteous
lives in the pulpit.

Preachers and pastors are human, just like other people.
They make mistakes; they experience tragedies. But if we as pastors fail
to confess our weaknesses and repent of our sins, live godly lives, we help
create the criticism and indifference toward the church on the part of the
people. As long as we have ministers who have shattered homes and marriages
and are poor role models as husbands and fathers, the church will not reach
those families who need our preaching and teaching, love and
support.

Many black families, therefore, are leaving our
traditional black churches. They join other black and even white churches
where the Bible is preached and taught, and whose Christ-centered church
programs inspire, educate, and help all ages of people. Still a growing number
of others reject Christianity because of racist attitudes and actions practiced
against blacks in many white churches. They join non-Christian religions
and cults where they look for commitment, integrity, strength, sincerity,
and discipline in what they are trying to do. These people shrug and say,
"What's the church doing that makes a difference? Some preachers are the
greatest con artists around." And they point to the preachers who live in
palatial homes and drive expensive cars, but have little or no real compassion
for the needs of the people.

If the leaders of the church do not "walk their talk,"
it has a devastating effect on the family. The Apostle Peter wrote to
first-century pastors, "Be shepherds of God's flock that is under your care,
serving as overseers  not because you must, but because you are willing,
as God wants you to be; not greedy for money, but eager to serve; not lording
it over those entrusted to you, but being examples to the flock" (1 Peter
5:2-4).

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Pastor, are you clear about your "call" from God?
Or are you in the church because some other vocation fell through? If God
has called you to be a pastor, you are the shepherd. You must live a life
well-pleasing to God before your people. The same is true of deacons, elders,
choir members, and teachers. God has called us to lay down our lives for
the flock of God, to lead them and care for them.

A Relevant Message

Across America today there are multitudes of black church members
who are hungering for sound preaching and teaching from the Word of God.
They are spiritually undernourished because they're not getting "food for
the soul and mind." Many of our young people are college students; they've
been trained to think but when they come to some of our churches, they discover
that the preachers don't have a satisfying message. Their sermons are not
well-structured and very thin in biblical content. The main thrust is to
the emotions of the people, which is turning away many educated blacks today.
We need more biblical and expository preaching in our churches. We need pastors
who know how to present the Word of God intellectually, in the power of the
Holy Spirit, to meet the needs of people and their families in every area
of life.

Because we have been an oppressed people, and continue
to struggle with the effects of racism and discrimination, many churches
have substituted other gospels: civil rights, racism, social ethics, politics.
We may challenge our people to fight for their social, economic, and political
rights in this world, but such a message does not touch their moral and spiritual
life, nor does it prepare them for eternity. We must confront our people
with the right priorities. Jesus said, "What good is it for a man to gain
the whole world, yet forfeit his soul?" (Mark 8:36)

What then is our message? It must be the infallible,
authoritative and liberating Gospel of Jesus Christ. With

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John the Baptist we much preach, "The kingdom of God is near. Repent
and believe the good news!" (Mark 1:15) Repentance for our sins for neglecting
the commands of God, for failure to acknowledge Jesus Christ as our Savior
and Lord  this is where our message begins.

Today there are many who will say, "That's pie-in-the-sky
religion; we have to meet the needs of the people." Yes, we must, but we
must decide on our starting point. God says, "If My people who are called
by My name, will humble themselves and pray and seek My face and turn from
their wicked ways, then will I hear from heaven and will forgive their sin
and heal their land" (2 Chronicles 7:14).

Our land today is sick. God wants to heal our land,
including our families. But we must humble ourselves and repent of our sins
that are hindering the work of His Holy Spirit. If the condition of mankind
could have been changed through self-effort, then Christ's coming to earth
was a waste of time. But no, Christ had to come, die on the cross, and through
His death on the cross, burial and resurrection, we can be reconciled with
God and with each other. When men and women get right with God, it will affect
their family life, their relationship to society, and all other aspects of
life. This is the message that declares the truth, that demonstrates
power.

We as pastors and evangelists must become true prophets
of God to this generation. Then we can say as Jesus did: "The Spirit of the
Lord is on me, because He has anointed me to preach good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight
for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's
favor" (Luke 4:18-20).

Some people interpret this verse only in the spiritual
sense; others see it as a call to social action. But it is our own spiritual
heritage that shows us the intimate connection between salvation and social
action. James Stalling, in his book Telling the Story: Evangelism in Black
Churches, says, "It is upon the reception of a new life, liberated
from

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spiritual bondage, that Christian slaves and former slaves could
then enter into a more authentic quest for political
liberation."10 He then goes on to quote from The Conversion
Experiences of Black People in Slavery and Freedom:

It was out of this spiritual freedom that [Harriet Tubman] decided
to move toward her material, economic, and social freedom. It was after her
experience of God's forgiveness that she was assured God would lead her and
others in her race to freedom. It was at the moment of her spiritual liberation
that she realized that social liberation from slavery was
possible.11

In other words, says Stalling, personal and social
salvation for her went hand in hand.

Freedom from slavery and salvation from personal sin are closely
related themes in the slave material. They are intimately connected. As indicated
in the life of Harriet Tubman, the desire for social deliverance burned deep
in her breast along with the desire for personal salvation. Personal and
social salvation mutually influenced each other in the slave
tradition.12

This intimate connection between the Gospel and its
power to change lives and society is the key to an effective ministry to
families  but can be easily distorted. We must always keep our focus
on Jesus. We must bathe all our efforts in prayer, keeping our eyes on Him.
We must preach Christ, walk in His footsteps, and give cups of cold water
in His name and no other. For without Him, we can do nothing (see
John 15:5).

An Effective Ministry

Effective ministry that meets the needs of families in our communities
must be twofold: inreach and outreach.

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"Inreach" involves teaching and training our own members (adults
and children) in God's Word and its relevance to marriage and family life
 much as we have been discussing in this book. Special messages on
the family, classes for couples, prayer support group for single parents,
seminars on parenting  all of these should be an integrated and regular
part of our teaching ministry in the church.

But how do we lift up our vision for stable family
life, while at the same time encouraging and supporting those who have
experienced brokenness? If we preach on the importance of the father in the
home, will single parent families feel left out? If we emphasize the family,
are we neglecting the role the extended family and the church has played
in our cultural heritage? In The Church in the Life of the Black Family,
Wallace Charles Smith speaks to this challenge:

Given the American context, there is no question that one goal
of a black family enrichment program must be to shore up the strength of
the nuclear family. On the other hand, the nuclear family must also be seen
as fully in community with and linked with others .... The variances may
range from one-parent families in a nuclear arrangement to grandparents,
uncles, aunts, or godparents serving as the primary parents for youngsters
born outside the nuclear grouping.

What must be remembered is that a black family enrichment
program in black churches will certainly want to work toward stable nuclear
arrangements as a goal for black people .... [In our western context] young
blacks will be better able to advance economically and socially if the two-parent
approach is adopted. Single parents in this culture have a difficult time
making it economically. Beyond that fact, however, both biblically and
theologically the two-parent model also lies at the heart of our Judeo-Christian
faith. From a faith standpoint, this one fact alone means that strengthening
two-parent families must be the church's goal.13

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One way to encourage the family in the context of
the church is to provide a variety of programs to bring all ages into the
church's sphere. Pioneer Clubs or Awana for boys and girls teach important
skills and Bible memory. Programs for teens should be a high priority, where
youth can gather with spiritually mature but sympathetic adults and taught
how to cope with temptation, and how to protect themselves from the temptation
of drugs, alcohol, and immoral sexual activity. Youth for Christ, Young Life,
and other organizations might bring the youth from several different
congregations together. We should make it possible for boys and girls to
attend good Christian summer camps.

Then there are activities which bring youth and adults
together. Here are a few ideas:

One of the most important might be a mentoring program,
in which each teenager  especially those with only one parent in the
home  is teamed up with another caring adult of the same sex as the
teenager. The adult might attend sports or school activities the teen is
involved in, go out for pizza and talk, and just be a caring presence in
the teen's life.

Include children in your visitation teams to the homebound
or elderly  a dose of good medicine!

Sponsor (or encourage your families to participate in) a family
camp in the summer, getting away from the stresses of everyday life into
a setting for good teaching, good fellowship, and wholesome
activities.

Let's turn our attention to the second thrust of effective
ministry, which is an "evangelistic and social outreach" to

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all unconverted and unchurched individuals and families in our
community.

Reaching Out to Families

The most effective outreach ministry is community-based. That is
one reason the local church is a key element in helping to meet the black
family crisis.

When I was pastor of Smoot Memorial C&MA Church
in Cleveland, we had quite an evangelistic ministry, with our members going
door to door to witness and invite families to our church. One afternoon
as two of our ladies stopped at one house, they found the family in a deplorable
condition. The plaster was falling off the walls, very little food was in
the house, the father was sitting in a beat-up old chair watching a television
that was on its last legs; hardly any light came into the room. There were
ten children in the home  really hurting kids. Our women said, "We'd
like to help you."

I went over to see the family and confirmed the report.
I sent two of our men to the house to repair the walls; we gathered food
and clothing for the kids and parents, and in about a month the whole family
turned out to the church and it was a happy occasion when they came. One
Sunday morning several members of the family came forward and professed faith
in Christ. One of the men who went to this house was a professional painter;
he hired the father and taught him how to paint. Finally the father started
his own business as a means of supporting his large family. The primary role
the church played was to support this family until they could support
themselves.

Preston Robert Washington says, "The church might
do well to recognize the fact that it deals with real people, in a
particular location, with their collective sense of history and
tradition .... The weak, defenseless, and oppressed individual, family, or
neighborhood also is 'our kind of people.' "14

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"The development of actual programs which will address
the problems of the black family," says author Wallace Smith, "must be done
in light of societal realities facing the black family. These realities are
that as a suffering community blacks in America are significantly worse off
than whites in the areas of health, jobs, education, and
housing."15

Smith points to Maslow's "hierarchy of needs" as a
helpful understanding of evaluating basic needs and preparing hearts for
the Gospel. In Maslow's theory, certain basic needs must be met before an
individual or family can begin to address needs on the next level. For instance,
the most basic need level is physical: food and shelter. The Apostle James
challenged, "Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food.
If one of you says to him, 'Go, I wish you well; keep warm and well fed,'
but does nothing about his physical needs, what good is it?" (James 2:15-16)
Our faith must reach out in action.

Praise God for the black churches which are reaching
out to the hurting families in their communities, growing out of their primary
message of Christ's redemption, not as a substitute for it. They
include:

Rock of Our Salvation (Evangelical Free) Church (the Rev. Raleigh
Washington, pastor), located in the Austin area of Chicago. The church not
only shares a building with Circle Urban Ministries (Glen Kehrein, director)
but the church and CUM are partners in ministry. "CUM does a lot of what
the Rock isn't equipped to do but needs to be involved in  such as
health care and legal aid," Kehrein says. "Likewise, CUM ... needed a pastor
and a church that could provide spiritual nurturing to people who came to
CUM."

Faithful Central Baptist Church (Dr. Kenneth Ulmer, pastor), on
the border of turf claimed by two of Los Angeles' most violent gangs 
the "Rolling Sixties" and the "Hoover Street Crips." The church both offers
support to families that have been affected by gang violence and has formed
an intervention program called Jeopardy: the police provide names of at-risk
juveniles; the church members make contact with the families and follow
through.

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Voice of Calvary Fellowship (John Perkins, founder) in the inner
city of Jackson, Mississippi. This church believes that if Christians are
going to make a witness in the black communities, they must demonstrate that
the people who bear the name of Christ must be reconcilers and not dividers.
This integrated church fellowship and ministry provides emergency relief
to hurting families through its Agape Center. Voice of Calvary trains future
leaders through its Harambee Youth Program, and addresses the critical housing
needs in the area through Adopt-a-House  a program which renovates
housing and sells them to families below cost, making homeowners of people
who would otherwise be at the mercy of slumlords.

The First Church of God in Christ in Evanston, Illinois (Rev. Michael
Curry, pastor). This church recently dedicated their new counseling center,
The Lighthouse, which provides a drug hotline, counseling for pregnant teens,
and other support services. One of these is a support group for men called
"Brothers in Crisis." The thrust of BIC is "Brothers in Christ" ministering
to "Brothers in Crisis," coming alongside and giving support in the whole
range of critical issues facing black men today  unemployment, low
self-esteem, drug and alcohol abuse, broken family relationships. The goal
is not only to provide resources for dealing with the crisis, but to provide
spiritual hope.

In addition, there are such churches as the Bible
Way Church and Third Church of God in Washington, D.C. and the Abyssianian
Baptist Church in Harlem  both reaching out to their communities. But
every black church should be such a lighthouse of spiritual hope,
pointing people to Jesus Christ, the Savior. Each one of us can begin right
where we are to be God's cup of cold water to hurting families. It begins
with prayer, encouraged by the Holy Spirit

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Spirit, prayer calling on God to renew our lives, our leaders,
and our churches. And then prayer that God would give us the vision and resources
to be God's family to His hurting children.

Some things to think about and do:

1. Pastors and church leaders, have you experienced the
redeeming work of Christ in your own heart and life? Are you an example to
your flock of what it means to be a godly person in the church and at
home?

2. Is there a small group of people who could meet regularly
for prayer and Bible study to seek God for a work the Holy Spirit wants to
do through your church in evangelizing your community with the Gospel of
Jesus Christ?

3. What is the primary message of your church? Does your
message depend on changes in society and government to help people, or is
your message the Word of God, which gives hope, happiness, and deliverance
even in the midst of devastating circumstances?

4. Pastor or youth worker, could you set up a mentoring
program for children without fathers in your congregation? (Or Christian
father, is there a youth from a single-parent family you could "adopt" as
a mentor and friend?)

5. What are the most pressing needs of the families in your
community: housing? absent fathers? unemployment? poverty? health? drug or
alcohol abuse? wife and/or child abuse? child care? In what ways is your
church helping to address these needs? Or in what way might your church begin
to address these needs?

6. Will you believe God's promise for these needs 
"Call unto Me, and I will answer thee, and show thee great and mighty things
which thou knowest not" (Jeremiah 33:3).

Done made my vow to the LordAnd I never will turn back.I will go, I shall go,To see what the end will be.

The assault on the family from every side is real. The very
survival of the black family is at stake. During the Third National Summit
on Black Church Development, Mike Faulkner said, "The crisis [in black America]
is of such magnitude, it behooves us as African-American churchmen to call
upon God on behalf of our nations for healing."1

And yet we have hope. As long as the Gospel is being
preached, as long as there are churches reaching out to their communities
with a relevant ministry, there will be Christian families who are building
their foundations on the Solid Rock. We take exception to the critics who
are saying that the family is doomed. Yes, the family is in crisis; it is
being buffeted in the storm, but it will not be destroyed! The family will
survive the struggle.

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Having said that, however, we must ask how the black
family can keep its identity and be restored when it's threatened on every
side? How can the ship stay afloat?

Keep the Old Landmarks

When a ship is battered at sea, it finds its way by familiar landmarks
that can be trusted. The same is true of the family. Although we must adapt
to our ever-changing culture, it is vitally important that we are not simply
adrift, or we will end up broken on the shoals of selfishness, sinfulness,
and perversion. We must keep on course, our goal set by the Word of God,
keeping the old landmarks in sight.

"Remove not the ancient landmark, which thy fathers
have set," warned the writer of Proverbs (22:28). But we must be deliberate
about keeping the biblical landmarks, because they are being systematically
dismantled. Some people are declaring that the family based on Judeo-Christian
principles is on its way out. Sexuality is simply a matter of "preference";
live-in partners should have the same legal rights as spouses; homosexual
"families" are "just another alternative." "Husband" and "wife" have been
replaced by the term "sexual partner" in sex education literature; the schools,
social agencies, and government are seen as the responsible parties in caring
for our children instead of the home.

There are other landmarks which have served us well,
which have guided us through many difficult periods. The autobiography of
John H. Johnson, owner of Johnson Publications, which publishes Jet
and Ebony, refers frequently to many of the ancient landmarks
which have guided many of us through difficult times and situations. Says
one author who reviewed his book, "Johnson grew up in poverty in Arkansas
and spent some time on welfare in Chicago, but he believed that if he was
willing to work hard on a single goal that he could make something of his
life. Show me

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a black family which has moved from poverty to prosperity, and
I will show you people who have followed the ancient landmark of hard
work [emphasis added]."

Johnson's story is also one of overcoming many personal
and societal obstacles. Says the author, "Somebody must hold up this ancient
landmark: life is not easy ... When the obstacles come along and we are set
back, how do we respond? Do we give up and settle for something less? ...
Or do we remember the ancient landmark that the race is not to the swift,
or the battle to the strong, but to him who endureth to the
end?"2

A choice stands before us. We can throw up our hands
and let the tides of popular culture and the storms of social foment throw
us about where they will. Or we can keep the ancient landmarks clearly in
our vision, and let them move us forward into our inheritance as black families.
Remember Moses' challenge to the people as they stood at the crossroads between
the wilderness and the Promised Land:

See, I set before you today life and prosperity, [or] death and
destruction. For I command you today to love the Lord your God, to walk in
His ways, and to keep His commands, decrees and laws; then you will live
and increase, and the Lord your God will bless you in the land you are entering
to possess.

But if your heart turns away and you are not obedient,
and if you are drawn away to bow down to other gods and worship them, I declare
to you this day that you will certainly be destroyed ....

I have set before you life and death, blessings and
curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children my live
(Deuteronomy 30:15-19, emphasis added).

Benjamin L. Hooks, executive director of the NAACP,
puts some of these ancient landmarks in perspective: "Adherence to traditional
civil rights action remains as vital as

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ever, but for many in our society, something extra is needed. No
need seems more urgent than the recapture and restoration of old and cherished
values  decency, morality, hard work and education  by which
the majority of black Americans once directed their
lives."3

Knowing our heritage, owning our pilgrimage, even
through the dark days of slavery, reclaiming the spiritual strength that
has enabled us to endure, opening up God's Word in our hearts and our homes
 all are part of keeping the landmarks clearly fixed.

It's true that the crisis in the black family looms
so large that many problems seem beyond our control. It's so easy to feel
hopeless because we feel helpless to do anything about our
problems. But instead of resigning ourselves to victim status, many black
leaders are saying it's time for African Americans to take
action.

We Must Take Control of Our Own Destiny

William Raspberry, columnist for The Washington Post, wrote:
"A myth has crippled black America; the myth that racism is the dominant
influence in our lives. Two things flow from this racism-is-all myth. It
puts the solution to our difficulties outside our control. And it encourages
the fallacy that attacking racism as the source of our problems is the same
as attacking our problems."4

Raspberry doesn't deny that racism and all its attendant
evils have thrown roadblocks into the path toward success for African Americans.
But he challenges the attitude that we must wait for white America to get
its moral act together before we can do anything about the crisis in our
communities and families. "Let's say you're exactly right," he tells black
leaders, "that racism is the overriding reason for our situation and that
an all-out attack on racism is our most pressing priority. Now let us suppose
that we eventually win the fight ... What would you urge we do next? ...
Well, why don't we pretend the racist dragon

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has been slain already  and take that next step right
now."5

Joe Clark, who gained national attention for his tough
discipline while principal of Eastside High School in Paterson, New Jersey,
says, "I have noted that a growing number of concerned blacks refuse to accept
the cries of historical deprivation which blame "Whitey' and 'the system'
as the root causes for the decline in the basic fabric of black life. These
people want to be consequential to society as opposed to being a
liability to society. In essence, Marcus Garvey probably put it most
profoundly, 'Up, up, you mighty race, you can accomplish what you will!'
"6

Clark directs his challenge especially to black men.
"It is time for blacks to take charge of their fate .... Being a highly
optimistic individual, I state emphatically that the situation can be repaired
with assiduity and conviction. This cannot take place until acknowledgement
of this plight is accepted. Probably the root cause is the breakdown of the
family structure ... Without strong black men at the helm of the ship, its
ultimate rendezvous will be with doom."7

The Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, cofounder of the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and pastor of Greater New Life Baptist
Church in Cincinnati, told a group of African-American leaders at the Ohio
Black Expo in August 1990: "We have gotten so lazy that we let government
agencies raise our children. Those responsibilities belong to black families
and black churches. The leaders in our communities must take control
again."8

At the same gathering, capital city SCLC president,
Jerome Jordan, said that the black church must work in conjunction with community
organizations to improve the conditions of black Americans. Jordan said SCLC's
goals are to make sure the black church is no longer a "sleeping giant" in
the community. Shuttlesworth agreed that "taking control" must include a
spiritual renewal: "A few people whose hearts are determined can turn a world
upside down, but God must be at the center of our
struggle."9

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The voices of African-American women are being raised
in mutual accord. "We should neither ask nor accept that other races of people
hold themselves responsible for what happens to our youths," says Janet Ballard,
a leader in the national organization Alpha Kappa Alpha. "No, our actions
must demonstrate that blacks will take the leadership  with all of
the help and resources available  to save our
children."10

As African-American leaders in our communities 
parents, pastors, youth directors, and laypeople  we must unite in
a strong message to our young people: Take advantage of existing
opportunities.

Columnist William Raspberry says: "It is beyond arguing
that black Americans, especially youngsters in the inner cities, have fewer
options than justice requires. But it is also true that too many of them
fail to avail themselves of the opportunities that do exist ... I don't mean
to suggest that desperately poor youngsters ... should be blamed for all
their bad choices. But the society that shares the responsibility is much
closer at hand [than white society]: parents, teachers, ministers, journalists.
All have to help drive home to these young people the simple fact that even
their limited options hold the potential for turning their lives
around."11

The Rev. Tryone Crider, speaker at Central (Ohio)
State's Convocation in 1989, urged students, "Stop talking about your dreams
and goals and start doing whatever you want to become." He also strongly
urged them to take control of their own lives. "Young ladies, say, 'No, I
didn't come here to get a baby; I came here to get a degree.' ... What is
more important, rapping or reading, discoing or discovering? You've got to
make good choices ... you've got to be strong." Crider continued as he encouraged
the students to avoid self-destruction, to not give up when times get tough,
to always do their best, be mentally alert, and let God be their best friend.
"He is a good friend to have. You ought to take God with you everywhere you
go.

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You cannot make it without God on your
side."12

These and other respected black Americans today are
sounding a common theme: hope is renewed when we take responsibility for
our own attitudes, actions, and choices. "When people believe that their
problems can be solved, they tend to get busy and solve
them."13

We Must Strengthen the Cords

All of us feel inadequate in the face of the forces battering the
black family today. But that's not such a negative state. When the Apostle
Paul was struggling with weakness, God told him, "My grace is sufficient
for you, for My power is made perfect in weakness" (2 Corinthians 12:9).
When we admit our weaknesses, we open ourselves to the power of God working
through us to strengthen the cords that bind our hearts and
homes.

It's important to ask God to show us how to get our
homes in order by strengthening the priorities and relationships in our own
homes and families. One way to do this is with a family checkup. You might
use this book as the basis for such a checkup, discussing the questions at
the end of each chapter with your spouse, family members, or a support group
of parents at church. Sometimes pastors, counselors, or marriage enrichment
programs have a "marriage checkup" that couples can do together.

The point is to set aside time, get away from other
responsibilities, and talk and pray together about your spiritual foundation,
family priorities, communication, unity on discipline of children, family
activities. Are there conflicts that need to be resolved? Are there relationships
that need to be reconciled?

Above all, we want to encourage you, husband and wife,
mom and dad, single parent or grandparent, to strengthen the cords by reading
the Bible and praying together. It is through prayer that we share our hearts
with God.

Networking is important. There is a story about an
ancient

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warlord who wished to pass on his kingdom to his twelve sons. But
his sons were a quarrelsome lot, each trying to outdo the other, and quick
to take advantage of his brother's weaknesses. The dying warlord called his
sons together, gave each an arrow, and asked if they could break their arrows.
Puffed with pride, each young warrior easily snapped his arrows. Then the
old man bound twelve arrows together and asked each son to try to break them.
One after the other grunted and strained, but not one could break the bundle
of arrows. They thought they had failed. But the father said, "If you keep
on quarreling among yourselves, each one looking out only for himself, you
will be broken as easily as you broke the single arrows. But if you lay aside
your quarrels and work together, no one will be able to break apart this
kingdom from your rule."

Our individual efforts may seem like a drop in the
bucket in helping turn around the fathers of our black families. But if we
discover one another, share our resources, and work together, we can strengthen
our cords and become a powerful force for change. In business terms, this
is called networking.

Janet Ballard, quoted earlier, says, "Blacks can save
our youths by reclaiming the institutions through which we can function totally
on our own ..., by becoming the models they so desperately need. We must
return to networking with traditionally black churches and organizations.
Black Americans must, in coalition with each other, identify the causes that
are destroying our youths. We must eliminate these causes from our own adult
lives and become the models our youths can
emulate."14

The Detroit-based Institute for Black Family Development
under the leadership of its president, Matthew Parker, is committed to equipping
existing church leaders to strengthen families within their own congregations.
To meet this objective, the institute produces materials and conducts seminars
to help empower pastors and laymen

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and women with resources which they can take back to their own
congregations. (See "Resources for the Black Family" in the back of this
book.)

The Institute also believes that part of the crisis
facing the black family is that the underclass, in particular, has lost the
vision for what is possible. If all you see around you is failure, you will
simply learn failure. To learn success, you need models of success. Some
of the solutions to the crisis in the black family are being generated by
the black community itself, including black churches. Part of the Institute's
task is to identify individuals and Christian organizations in the black
community dealing with the problems of the black family in imaginative and
innovative ways  and bringing churches and concerned black leaders
together to share ideas and resources and develop shared objectives and mutual
cooperation.

In reporting on the Third National Summit on Black
Church Development, mentioned earlier, Christianity Today said: "One
major result of these informal meetings has been to enable black-led urban,
rural, and overseas evangelism ministries to discover one
another."15

A similar consortium of some 200 black ministers from
Michigan to California gathered in Los Angeles in July 1989 for the Harambee
Pastors Summit (Harambee is a Swahili word meaning "let's pull together").
"And pulling together is what black America has to do," said ministers gathered
for the summit, if problems such as drug abuse, teen pregnancy, and unemployment
are ever going to be properly addressed and controlled within inner-city
communities. "We don't want to be spiritually on welfare or physically on
welfare," said Harambee president Chuck Singleton, a Fontana, California
minister, who added that the church could succeed where governmental programs
have failed. "We believe solutions to problems in black America lie in black
America."16 The Rev. Kenneth Ulmer, chairman of Harambee and pastor
of Faithful Central Baptist Church in Los Angeles, said, "Prior to the 1950s
there

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was a spiritual focus on solving these problems only. In the '60s
and '70s there was a social focus only. But now, we realize it's not either/or,
but both/and."17

In order to strengthen the cords for an increasingly
demoralized black underclass, each of us must find ways to reach out and
give a hand to our brothers and sisters who are floundering in the inner
cities. John Johnson, the publisher of Ebony and Jet mentioned
earlier, in commenting on the responsibility of the black middle class, said,
"I think all of us have to reach back  for very selfish reasons. I
don't think black people, be they rich or poor, will ever be free until we
are all free. I have done very well for myself, but not a day goes by when
I am not reminded that I am black. [Singer] Paul Robeson once said he could
never go anywhere as Robeson that he couldn't go as a black man. We have
to fight for the respect of all blacks, before we can get it
ourselves."18

There's a great need for black American lawyers, doctors,
musicians, artists, athletes, business people, and others to return to the
inner city and put something back into the community. A recent television
program featured a prominent black lawyer in Washington, D.C., a former "ghetto
kid," who went on to school and bettered his education. One day he visited
one of the blighted areas where he was born and felt a real commitment to
do something for the kids. He went back and gained their confidence, formed
a baseball team, bought them uniforms, etc. One day one of the kids said
to him, "We appreciate what you're doing for us. We know you don't live here
anymore. Some of us were wondering what you're in to." The kid smiled slyly.
"You must be one of them cocaine kings."

The lawyer was shocked. "Why would you say
that?"

They shrugged. "You drive a fine car, you come and
go as you please. We decided you must be dealing drugs."

Only then did it dawn on the lawyer that these kids
had only limited role models; either you were down and out, or you were "making
it" dealing drugs.

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Moses McClendon, national president of Phi Beta Sigma,
says, "Each of us, and particularly black men, must move immediately to
re-involve ourselves in some type of religious community. We must seek out
the remnants of the previously existing youth training organizations and
become volunteers. We must recognize that the inner-city urban areas have
become desolate because of our departure and the withdrawal of our talents;
and we must reestablish our connection with these communities. We must
become personally involved."19

And Regina Frazier, national president of The Links,
Inc., argues, "Positive role models are still our most effective weapons
in an arsenal that seeks to convince youths that they must set long-term
goals, and then have the tenacity to bring those goals to fruition. Life
is a cyclical experience. As such .... each of us reaching down and pulling
up ... will erode the societal stratification of class
delineation."20

Another cord that must be strengthened is the education
of our young people. Douglas Wilder, governor of Virginia, and also cochairman
of the Commission on African-Males, discussed this matter in an interview
with USA Today's Barbara Reynolds. Note some of his insightful
comments:

Our societal values across the board have just disintegrated. Take
the movie Wall Street, where the leading character says that greed
is good. It is money, bucks. No one is saying the good life comes as a result
of years of planning, saving for a college education for your kids, a sacrifice
for your generation so the next generation will be better. All that's gone.
So this affects all Americans, but disproportionately African-Americans because
they have less family immunity to that kind of harm.

Education is key. We've got to make certain
that

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opportunities exist for college and to improve what we do in vocational
education.

[We must] provide opportunities and help them assume
responsibilities. But give them values. Those values have to come from a
family setting. Where there's no home, we've got to provide the surrogate
support system, and that could only come from the community, from the
neighborhood.

Our parents always told us: You can be whatever it
is you want to be as long as you don't waste your opportunities, as long
as you become as educated as you can become. Don't waste your time. Do your
homework and respect the rights of others. Respect family because it's the
one thing that will stand with you in the years to come. And understand that
man is not the keeper or the maker of his destiny. There is a superior
being.21

Dr. Rejesta Perry (Sigma Gamma Rho) helps focus where
the responsibility for education lies: "Enforcing quality education in schools
is the job of parents, black organizations and churches, which should act
as self-appointed watchdog groups ... making sure that black children, wherever
they are educated, receive an appropriate distribution of funds for their
education."22

How can parents encourage quality education? At home.
"Students must learn to balance social activities and academic activities.
One way parents can increase their children's academic activities is to help
them develop good study habits. Once your child develops and internalizes
good study habits, they will be rewarded with better academic achievement
... The rewards for academic achievement will lead to a successful
career."23

Yes, we must be involved in the schools. Yes, we must
vote for appropriate legislation to improve the quality of education our
children receive. Yes, we must support community action to keep gangs and
drugs out of our schools.

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But in the meantime we can help our children take the attitude
of the principal who told students who complained about this or that teacher,
"There never was a teacher who kept me from getting an
education."

Parents, set aside study time; enforce it. Turn off
the TV and music during this time. Read with your children; play learning
games; look at maps of different parts of the world and helpful features
that are in the news. Insist on regular attendance at school; be in contact
with your child's teachers. Quality education begins in our
homes.

Probably nothing makes parents feel more helpless
than the drug menace that is unraveling our children's future faster than
we can strengthen the cords of protection around them. But there is a critical
role that parents must play. As Jesse Jackson said in an interview with
Ebony magazine, "The government can cut the supply of drugs,
but 'we the people' must cut the demand for
drugs."24

Drug abuse is connected to many of the other problems
plaguing our homes and communities. Many crimes  assault, robbery,
burglary  are committed by people who need money to support their chemical
addiction. The lure of big bucks selling drugs short-circuits educational
and career goals. Drug trafficking is often behind gang-related violence.
And, says Jackson, "Drugs, not sexual contact, have become the chief transmitter
of AIDS. Drugs and crime are directly related. Drugs are dream busters and
hope destroyers."25

Part of the problem, Jackson says, is that we aren't
mad enough yet. "I visit high schools and talk with students, and I often
ask them what they would do if someone brought little ropes and KKK sheets
and spread them out on the table at their next party. They unanimously say
they would immediately run that person away from the party. Then I ask these
same students, 'What would you do if someone brought some drugs  a
little cocaine, a little "snow"  to the party and spread them out on
the table?' They usually say something like, 'Well, I'd tell them to
go

Page 186

in the other room; don't do that stuff around me.' In other words,
the response is less clear and less than total rejection. Our minds and our
morals do not reject dope to the degree that we reject the rope. Yet we are
losing more of our young people to dope than we ever lost to the rope! ...
Dope pushers live in our neighborhoods and try to pass themselves off as
our friends. Our total community must reject the dope pushers and see them
as terrorists. We must change our minds, our morals, and our
conduct."26

Actor Tim Reid, vice chairman of the Entertainment
Industry's Council for a Drug-Free Society, has said, "No one is forcing
anyone to snort anything through their nose, or inject anything into their
veins or swallow anything to get high. That's coming from people's own needs
and weakness. What has to change is black people's attitude toward drugs
... We can't use racism as a catch-all for all the ills of our community.
Drugs are illegal. Anybody who deals in drugs should pay the price, be they
white, black, or any other color."27

Without holding white racism blameless, Dr. Lorraine
Hale, director of Hale House, a haven for drug-addicted children, says that
in the final analysis, "It is up to black people to rid themselves of this
antisocial menace."28

What can parents do? Search Institute reports that
there are "six factors which research and experience suggest are important
components in preventing adolescent chemical abuse."29 They are
as follows:

1. Parent expectations. Alcohol and drug use
is relatively low among adolescents whose parents set strict rules about
chemical use, monitor compliance, and enforce the rule.

Mom or Dad, do you insist that all parties
and teen gatherings be drug and alcohol free? Do you require reasonable curfews?
Know the warning signs of possible

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drug or alcohol use? What are your kids learning by your own
example?

2. Peer influence. Chemical use or nonuse is
strongly related to what one's friends do. Parents can undermine the negative
influence of friends both by steering children away from certain associations
and toward other relationships where the influence is known to be more
positive.

Parents, get to know your child's friends! Invite
them to your house (Yes, yes, it's noisy and they eat a lot  but it's
important to know who your child's friends are). Offer to drive them places.
Throw parties at your house where you can supervise.

3. School environment. Chemical use tends to
be lower among adolescents in schools where there are firm policies about
drug use and where these policies are maintained and enforced.

Parents, do you know what your children's schools
are doing to educate students and combat drug abuse among the student body?
Find out; insist on education for both students and parents. Band together
with other parents to demand removal of gang (and drug-related) paraphernalia
at school. Insist on "closed campuses" or whatever it takes to keep drug
pushers out.

4. Social networks. The degree to which adolescents
are involved in adult-supervised programs and activities is another factor
which inhibits chemical use.

Encourage your child to get involved in youth activities
at church, or positive activity groups at school, the local park district,
and community center. If at all possible, provide music, art, sports activities,
or other special interests. It's less expensive in the long run than hanging
out on the street corner.

5. Social competency. A number of social skills,
all of which can be promoted by family, school, church,

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or other organizations, can serve as important factors in
prevention. These include friendship-making skills, communication skills,
decision-making skills, and the ability to say "no" when peer pressure
mounts.

Parents, keeping your kids under lock-and-key is not
the answer to surviving adolescence. Young people need to experience making
decisions  even if sometimes they make the wrong choices. But if you
give them increasing opportunity in areas that are not moral issues or
life-threatening (what to wear, choice of activities, how to spend their
own money, etc.), they will be better able to make good decisions in areas
that count.

6. Personal values. Adolescents who refrain
from alcohol and drug use, in comparison to other youth, are more committed
to education and educational achievement, more involved in people-helping
activities, more confident that the future holds promise, more affirming
of religion, and more able to resist immediate gratification of
needs.

In short, the very things we have been encouraging
in this book. Reclaiming our spiritual heritage, acknowledging our need for
God, getting our priorities straight, building up our own marriages and homes
will go a long way toward strengthening the cords of protection around our
young people, enabling them to resist the insidious pressures of the drug
culture.

Does this happen overnight? Of course not. Each individual
family and our communities as a whole have a long uphill flight. It's easy
to get discouraged. But we don't have to wait until all the problems are
solved.

We Can Renew the Hope

For the Christian family, we find hope in God's promises to stand
by those who put Him first in their lives and obey

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His commandments, even when it means bucking society's values.
The Apostle Paul encouraged the early Christians, "Marriage should be honored
by all, and the marriage bed kept pure, for God will judge the adulterer
and all the sexually immoral. Keep your lives free from the love of money
and be content with what you have, because God has said, 'Never will I
leave you; never will I forsake you.' So we say with confidence, 'The
Lord is my helper; I will not be afraid. What can man do to me?' " (Hebrews
1:4-6, emphasis added).

Paul mentions several big problems which are destroying
the family  sexual immorality, love of money, and discontentment 
and says that none other than the sovereign God, Lord of lords, King of kings
will be our helper! We don't have to fear! Our God is bigger than the
crisis!

Fear and faith are very similar in that they both
stem from a belief in what's going to happen. Fear, however, destroys
while faith builds up.

This doesn't mean that just because we as a family
have faith, we will not have problems or suffer in the crisis. David, whom
God had promised would be king of Israel, spent years running for his life!
But he never gave up hope; he clung to the promises of God; he remained faithful
to God and God remained faithful to him. "Be strong and take heart," David
wrote, "all you who hope in the Lord" (Psalm 31:24).

At one point in his life David blew it; he committed
adultery, then covered it up with murder. But when confronted with his sin,
he repented and God restored His blessing. You may feel you've blown it too.
But it's never too late to turn back to God and turn your family
around.

Hope is the turning point. Do we believe the crisis
in the black family will consume us? Or do we believe that your family and
our family, your church and our church, with the power of God, can make a
difference? It is up to us to restore hope, not only to this generation,
but to the ones to come. The psalmist wrote:

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[The Lord] commanded our forefathers to teach their children, so
the next generation would know [His commandments], even the children yet
to be born, and they in turn would tell their children. Then they would put
their trust in God and would not forget His deeds but would keep His commands.
They would not be like their forefathers  a stubborn and rebellious
generation, whose hearts were not loyal to God, whose spirits were not faithful
to Him (Psalm 78:5-8).

With God's help, we can break into the vicious cycles which
are sucking our families into crisis. We can overcome someday  and
that someday is now. It is up to us. "I have set before you life and death,
blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may
live and that you may love the Lord your God, listen to Him, and hold fast
to Him" (Deuteronomy 30:20).

Will you join us in choosing life?

Some things to think about and do:

1. Do you believe the answers to the crisis facing the black
family can be found in the black community? Why or why not?

2. In what ways do you feel like a victim of societal attitudes
and government regulations? In what ways might you change from victim-status
to taking control of your own destiny?

3. Brainstorm ways you might join forces (networking) with
other churches (even predominantly white or asian churches) and organizations
to strengthen black families. Contact one or more of the organizations in
the Resources section of this book for ideas.

4. What gifts and resources do you have that you might be
able to "give back" to inner-city youth, communities, schools, churches?
Make a plan to invest yourself back into the black community in some way
in the next year.

5. Parents, what can you do to encourage good study habits
and educational activities in your own home?

6. Of the six factors mentioned which inhibit drug abuse
among adolescents, which ones need special attention in your
home?

Howard and Wanda
Jones, married for fifty-seven years, resided
in Oberlin, Ohio, and have five grown children and six grandchildren. Howard
was a past president of the National Black Evangelical Association, visiting
lecturer at St. Paul Bible College, board member of the National Religious
Broadcasters, and associate evangelist with the Billy Graham Evangelistic
Association. Wanda was a former teacher at a school for mentally handicapped
children and spoke frequently at Bible, Missions, and women's conferences
both in the United States and overseas.
In Memoriam
Howard &
Wanda